Mind the Gap: The Lag in Americans’ Access to Online Healthcare Services Is Even Worse Than It Appears
Dan PrinceHealthLeaders FACTFILE on Healthcare Online Trends really caught my attention when it came out last week. Because we at Catalyst Healthcare Research spend so much time thinking about the presentation of data, I was struck by how the charts, admirable as they were, failed to tell the story about the huge gap between Americans’ lives online and their online access to healthcare.
For example, FACTFILE shows this distinction between “Internet Access By Age” and “Obtaining Lab and Test Results [Online]”
At a glance, the gap doesn’t look like a big deal. “Okay,” you could conclude – without really looking at the numbers – “lots of people have access to the internet, but a fair number of them don’t access lab test results online.”
We redrew the charts to make the scale the same on both, and the message changes. Lots of people have access to the internet, and almost nobody is getting their lab results online.
The study looked at not only how many Americans get lab results online but how many learn about physicians online, communicate with providers online, make appointments online, pay medical bills online and more. For each of these activities, the numbers of people performing them is miniscule, compared to the numbers of people who have access to the Internet.
I don’t want to diminish the value of the data that HealthLeaders, partnering with Thomson Reuters, provided. But the gap between what Americans could be doing online to communicate about and manage their healthcare – and what they are doing is even starker than HealthLeaders’ charts make it appear.
I’ll be looking into this gap, the factors that make it so hard to close and where progress is being made in the next few weeks and months. Stay tuned.
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