At Nielsen Online, we see copious examples of how people are using the Internet to look for healthcare information and to inform their decisions and choices. We wanted to learn more, and in Q2 of this year we conducted an online survey with 1,022 respondents to find out what resources consumers use and trust - both online and offline - as they look for information as part of their healthcare decision-making process. I recently conducted a webinar on this topic (download the full presentation here), but wanted to share an overview of our findings on “Connecting the Dots” as well.

• Doctors and other healthcare professionals remain in the lead when it comes to a resource that consumers would use and trust for healthcare information and this is true across all of the segments we looked at.
• Online resources come in a strong second place - consumers especially trust websites with professionally written content, like the American Diabetes Association website or the content areas of WebMD or Revolution Health. We have entered an era of collaborative healthcare - patients want to play an active role in their treatment decisions - and the ubiquity and 24-hour availability of the Internet is clearly making it a resource that people want to use as part of their healthcare information-gathering and decision-making process.
• When patients and caregivers look online for healthcare information, they are most likely to go directly to sites they know. Pharma/healthcare marketers need to promote their brand and website address across all communication channels to make sure that patients know where to look for this information when they are ready for it.
• People who are frequently involved in social networking (every day or a few times a week) are more active than the average respondent in seeking healthcare information across all different media types. Not only are these frequent social networkers more likely than the average respondent to consult online resources, as we would expect, they are also more likely to turn to family/friends, and even traditional print channels such as newspapers, magazines and books. This is a group of people with intense information-gathering tendencies - they are important to pharma/healthcare marketers because they can be reached through multiple information channels and, in turn, they have the power to influence others through the amplification of their voices in the online/social media environment.
• We also identified a segment of individuals who are Ad Unaware - unable to identify the correct treatment area for some of the top-advertised brands in the world. This group is important for pharma/healthcare marketers because they are not currently being reached through traditional DTC advertising channels. Interestingly, this group seems more open to pharmaceutical companies’ websites than the average respondent. This group is also significantly more likely to participate in social networking than the average respondent. By leveraging some social media/Web 2.0 tools on their own brand websites, pharmaceutical companies may be able to bring this unaware population into the fold.

The Frequent Social Networkers and the Ad Unaware are of special interest to me - I didn’t expect to see some of the behaviors that came through in their survey results. Watch for some additional insights on these groups to be posted in this space in the coming weeks.

Tags: cgm, healthcare, pharma