|
 “While we found that the majority of seniors use basic digital
technology, very few are using digital health technology or the
advanced features the internet has to offer, said lead study author
Dr. David Levine, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and Brigham
and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
“The use rate is likely so low because we do not currently offer
usable tools to seniors,” Levine added by email. “It's like asking a
teenager to play backgammon or write a snail mail letter.”
To understand how seniors use the internet for health purposes,
Levine and colleagues examined data from a nationally representative
survey of adults 65 and older who don’t live in nursing homes or
other care facilities.
Altogether, they had data on about 7,600 seniors, collected from
2011 through 2014.
At the start of the study, participants were about 75 years old on
average.
In 2011, 76 percent of seniors had cell phones and 64 percent used
computers in 2011, but only around 40 percent of them used the
internet, email or texting.
Fewer still used digital technology for health purposes, researchers
report in JAMA.
About 16 percent of them reported going online to find information
about a medical issue in 2011. By 2014, this crept up to about 18
percent.
The proportion of seniors using the internet to fill prescriptions
inched up from 8 percent in 2011 to 10 percent by the end of the
study period.
For contacting doctors, seniors also became slightly more likely to
go online; this rose from 7 percent at the beginning of the study to
almost 12 percent in 2014.
While seniors were also a little more likely to handle health
insurance issues online by the end of the study than at the start,
the gain from 5 percent to 6 percent wasn’t large enough to be
statistically meaningful.
One limitation of the study is that many participants dropped out or
died, the authors note.
The survey also was confined to a single group of people who
enrolled in 2011, which might not reflect more recent changes in how
seniors use the internet today.
[to top of second column] |
It’s also possible that the advanced age of the study population may
have influenced whether participants went online, said Dr. Nancy
Gordon, a researcher at Kaiser Permanente Northern California
Division of Research in Oakland.
“Internet access and internet use among seniors significantly
decreases with age, and tends to drop off significantly after the
age of 75 and even more so after the age of 80,” Gordon, who wasn’t
involved in the study, said by email.
At the same time, relatively few people in the current study had
college degrees or high income, two factors that can drive internet
use, Gordon added.
This can put already disadvantaged patients at an even bigger
disadvantage as doctors and hospitals increasingly do business
online to improve efficiency, save money and reduce waste.
“Resources that used to go into having people available to answer
calls at the doctor's office and making print materials available by
mail now go towards making these transactions performable online via
non-secure websites for health information or patient education
materials and secure patient portals for communications which
involve (personal or protected health information),” Gordon added.
“This means that seniors who can't or don't want to go online to get
patient education information or to communicate with their doctors
are going to find that it will become harder to get what they want
in the more traditional ways like phone and mail,” Gordon said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1c9i5E4 JAMA, online August 2, 2016.
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
