eHealth Consumers in Europe - Episode 36
Meredith Abreu Ressi, Vice President of Research

This fall, Manhattan Research completed its third annual Cybercitizen Health® Europe study, looking at consumer eHealth behavior across Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and the UK. Similar to previous years, we found that consumers across Europe are keeping pace with their counterparts in the U.S. when it comes to eHealth adoption and behavior. In fact, 85% of online consumers across these five countries report using the Internet for health information – compared to 88% of online consumers in the U.S. It is clear that around the Western world, health information seeking is one of the most common activities conducted online.

The way European consumers go about looking for health information online is a bit different from consumers in the U.S., however. In this country, the online health world has been flooded with advertising dollars, largely from the pharmaceutical industry seeking to reach patients for direct-to-consumer outreaches. European countries, however, do not see this same influx of cash to support health websites due to regulatory restrictions on direct to patient marketing. Because of this, the eHealth landscape has a more “do it yourself” flavor than the virtual smorgasbord of sites we see in the U.S.

As a result, we see that European consumers are highly search engine reliant when looking for health information. In fact, at most points along the treatment continuum, European consumers turn to search engines as a first line of defense for tracking down information.

Because of this behavior, search engine results tend to dictate the types of actual content sources consumers end up using. So where do you think they end up? Not surprisingly, this means that Wikipedia – which is highly favored by search engines – is the top site used for health in three out of the five countries surveyed. One exception is in the UK, the NHS site is, not surprisingly, the most well-visited site. Recent feature additions to the NHS HealthSpace site, which I spoke about last year in this podcast, will undoubtedly continue to drive reliance on the NHS sites.

Finally, one other type of content that is used even more frequently by online European consumers than their American counterparts is user-generated health content. That’s right – European consumers are more likely than American online users to use “health 2.0” content created by other patients – a finding that is not surprising given the high search engine placement given to user generated content, and the aforementioned lack of sites with deep editorial content in health within these countries.



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