The new Mozilla Firefox with spell check is excellent!

The always smart and useful Pew Internet & American Life Project has just published the very interesting study “Online Health Search” on how American’s use search engines and the Internet to learn about health issues. The findings are broad. Here are some top line findings that should interest health care marketers:

Eighty percent of American internet users, or some 113 million adults, have searched for information on at least one of seventeen health topics.

The typical health information session starts at a search engine, includes multiple sites, and is undertaken on behalf of someone other than the person doing the search.

As in previous surveys, certain groups of internet users are the most likely to have sought health information online: women, internet users younger than 65, college graduates, those with more online experience, and those with broadband access.

Internet users who have seen a doctor in the past year are more likely than those who have not to have looked online for health information (84% vs. 66%).

One-third of online searchers later talked to a doctor about what they found online. Two thirds did not.

We have had health care provider, insurance and manufacturing clients. It is clear from this study that the Internet must be examined for every marketer’s patient and outbound marketing programs.