Online Care
PM360 November 2009, p20

Attention Pharma: Nurses spend as much time online for professional purposes as doctors do and are more likely to recommend health Websites to patients. According to Manhattan Research’s “Taking the Pulse Nurse,” a 2009 national online survey of 1,001 nurses and physician assistants, nurses spend about eight hours a week online for work-related purposes such as seeking pharmaceutical information. They also play a big part in patient education, as 3 out of 4 nurses recommended Websites ranging from general sides such as WebMD, to government sites such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to pharmaceutical product sites. Or in other words, if you reach nurses, the patients will come.

The good news is that over 80% of nurses have visited the corporate site of a pharmaceutical, biotech, or device company in the past year, with Merck, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi-aventis the most popular. Nurses are also more likely to visit sites geared toward physicians, such as UpToDate, Epocrates, the American Medical Association, and Medscape. Although nurses visit sites such as Nursing Link, they are more concerned with the quality and usefulness of a site than whether it’s targeted to them. “In an age of heated debates around health reform, the role of nurses becomes even more critical in the evolution of the U.S. healthcare system,” said Manhattan Research President Mark Bard. “The addition of the nurse segment to the digital landscape review process is a natural step for most pharmaceutical companies embracing the online channel today with their patient and physician customers.” –A.M

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