I hate it when I have to repeat myself, it brings memories of those classic vinyl records and the needle hanging in the same groove. Nevertheless, it seems necessary.
What inspired me to come back to something I have written about before is the title of an article in today’s e-Health Europe, Half of European doctors use web video. I know, Mr. Hoeksma wants to attract readers and has the decency to be a bit more realistic inside the article.
Nearly half of online physicians in Western Europe watch online video for professional purposes, according to a new survey.
So we now know that it is NOT half of European doctors, but half of European doctors ONLINE. As I have said in my previous entry of this blog (The Goal of HIT), these doctors already are online and you can therefore expect that they will use online services. When looking at it that way, the 46% is rather disappointing.
So I went back to the source, the report “European eHealth Landscape” by Manhattan Research. It appears to be a new version of a document they published sometime last November. The first document does not give numbers on which the conclusions are based, i.e. the number of physicians taking part in the survey. However, bold statements are made:
- In fact, about two-thirds of physicians online use Wikipedia as a medical resource monthly or more often – and they’re even recommending it to patients.
- About 40% of European physicians recommend health websites to their patients.
Let’s have a detailed look. The first statement talks about online physicians. Knowing that these surveys are taken online, I assume that any conclusion in this report is based on online physicians. The second conclusion is therefore both disappointing and daring in respect to the first. It mentions a percentage of physicians in general, not just online. That’s the daring part. And it is disappointing to conclude that only 40% is recommending health websites to patients when you say before that two-thirds of physicians online are “even recommending it to patients“.
The more recent report gives some background:
The study was fielded online in Q4 2009 among 1,125 practicing physicians in Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
No physicians from The Netherlands, a country considered one of the top countries in Europe in ICT use, nor from Denmark, considered the leading European country in digital care. So, is this representative for Europe? And, as I wrote in my previous post, can 1,125 physicians be considered representative for those tens of thousands of physicians in Europe? Certainly not in such a way that Hoeksma can justify the title of his article “Half of European doctors use web video”.
Lodewijk Bos
