Digital Pharma: The rise of the European e-patient
pharmafile | June 14, 2011 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | Digital Pharma blog, online health information
The number of people in Europe who go online to look for health information has more than doubled over the last five years.
During that time the EU has grown in size, adding in 2007 Bulgaria and Romania – currently two of its least connected countries, but new information from the European Commission shows interest in online health information steadily rising.
Last year 34% of the European Union’s population browsed for health information, up from 16.1% in 2005, but there are wide variations between individual countries.
The figures suggest a likely corresponding rise in the number of ‘e-patients‘, internet-savvy patients who use the interest to research their health needs and then also go further by sharing their stories using social networking sites, blogs, Twitter and other forms of social media.
Luxembourg leads the way, with 58.2% of the population going online for health information, while bringing up the rear is Bulgaria, where just 13.5% of people used the internet to research health in 2010.
The data also shows that in pharma’s five largest markets in the region the number of people using the internet to look for health information varied by nearly 25%.
Germany, with 47.8% of the population, was ahead of France (36.4%), Spain (33.7%), the UK (32.2%) and Italy, which trailed at 22.9%.
The data is contained in the Commission’s Digital Scoreboard, which tracks progress across 60 indicators, from households with a broadband connection to the use of e-government services.
Part of the Commission’s Digital Agenda push, the information has also been made available in a useful set of interactive graphs.
The European countries most interested in online health information*
Luxembourg – 58.2%
Finland – 57.4%
Denmark – 51.7%
The Netherlands – 50.5%
Germany – 47%
Norway – 47%
Slovenia – 43.4%
Iceland – 41.7%
Hungary – 40.6%
Sweden – 40.5%
*% of population seeking online information about health (2010)
Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.
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