A new Datamonitor survey has found that 44 percent of women and 32 percent of men in the USA and Europe go online to search the Internet for health information.

More than half of the 4,531 respondents to the study said they had searched the Internet for health/medical information in the past year. Consumers gather their information from a variety of online sources including health information, government, university, and pharmaceutical company sites.

Datamonitor reports that “nearly 80% of people in the United States and 62% of Europeans consider themselves more health conscious than most people.”

Moderator’s Coment: How skilled are most HBC/Rx retailers
in the area of consumer education? Is this critical to a store’s/web site’s
sales performance or is price always the determining factor? [George
Anderson – Moderator]

• 44%
  Of Women Surf For Health Advice – ISP Preview

The use of the Internet related to health and health care continues to grow, according to a recent report from Harris Interactive.

Key findings include:

• Eighty percent of all adults who are online (53 percent of all adults) sometimes use the Internet to look for health care information. Eighteen percent do so “often,” while most do so “sometimes” (35 percent), or “hardly ever” (27 percent).
  
• This segment represents 110 million adults nationwide, compared with 54 million in 1998, 69 million in 1999 and 97 million last year.
  
• On average those who ever look for health care information online do so three times every month.
  
• Fifty-three percent of those who look for health care information do so using a portal or search engine. Twenty-six percent go directly to a site that focuses only on health-related topics and one in eight (12 percent) goes first to a general site that focuses on many topics that may have a section on health issues.
  
• Cyberchondriacs, a Harris Interactive term for those who go online for health information, include 82 percent of people aged 18 to 29, 84 percent of those with postgraduate education and 77 percent of people with household incomes greater than $75,000.

Moderator Comment: What retailers (bricks and/or clicks)
are effectively using web content to promote whole health initiatives? [George
Anderson – Moderator]

• 
  Cyberchondriacs Update – The Harris Poll® (#21, May 1, 2002)