The Internet is an increasingly popular source of health advice for millions of people with that number growing daily. More and more people are turning to the web to quickly get increasingly reliable and accurate information about local physicians, the latest health updates and blogs, to get advice for medical issues or simply to look up more info about a symptom they’re suffering from.
Many times however, these people aren’t even looking up medical information online for themselves, they’re actually doing it for someone else (such as a caregiver for an elderly person or a parent for their sick child). This effectively makes the scope of their impact on the web that much more vast. A 2011 Pew Research Center study reported that almost half of internet users (48%) went online to search for health information on behalf of another person and a further 11% said it was for both themselves and someone else.
The same Pew report claims that a staggering 59% out of all adults in the U.S. look for health information online, even though one-quarter of adults overall don’t even go online. Furthermore, eight in ten internet users go online to look up health information, making it the third most popular online activity among all those included in the Pew Internet Project’s surveys across all age groups of users.
With online access and WiFi hotspots increasingly obtainable to the general public as well as computers in schools and public libraries at one’s disposal, just about anyone regardless of income or educational background can go online. Most important of all has been the influx of smartphones on the market, giving people access to the internet on the go and within easy reach at all times of the day.
Convenient access to online information for patients has been a game-changer in the medical industry and no practice or clinic, big or small, can afford to miss out on so many prospective clients. Rx Medical Web has teams of experts that can not only design your website but optimize it as well, getting the search results you need to reach potential patients that can discover your services.