---
title: "New Health Data"
description: "The Pew Internet Project recently updated our top three Latest Trends charts: Who's Online, Internet Activities, and Daily Internet Activities."
date: "2008-07-30"
authors:
  - name: "Susannah Fox"
    job_title: "Former Researcher"
    link: "https://www.pewresearch.org/staff/susannah-fox/"
url: "https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2008/07/30/new-health-data/"
categories:
  - "Health Care"
  - "Health Policy"
  - "Healthcare Online"
  - "Medicine & Health"
  - "Online Search"
---

# New Health Data

The Pew Internet Project recently updated our top three Latest Trends charts: [Who's Online](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/trends/User_Demo_7.22.08.htm), [Internet Activities](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/trends/Internet_Activities_7.22.08.htm), and [Daily Internet Activities](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/trends/Daily_Internet_Activities_7.22.08.htm).

Two of the new data points relate to health and health care. The October-December 2007 national phone survey included 2,054 adults age 18 and older, including 500 cell phone users. Of those, 75% say they have looked for health or medical information online. 10% of internet users say they searched for health information "yesterday," which in a tracking survey like this one yields a picture of the "typical day" online. Health has moved up in the "typical day" list (from 7% in 2006 to the current 10% of internet users), but for most people the average day includes lots of emails (60% of internet users), general searches (49%), and news reading (39%) if they are online at all (30% of internet users are offline on a typical day).

With this survey, we returned to the health question wording we had used in [2000](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/PPF/r/26/report_display.asp) and [2002](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/PPF/r/59/report_display.asp): "Do you ever use the internet to look for health or medical information" (at that time yielding an estimate of 66% of internet users). In 2003-7, respondents were prompted with questions about specific health topics, such as diet, drugs, or alternative treatments, yielding a consistently higher estimate (80%) for the percentage of internet users who seek health information online in [2003](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/PPF/r/95/report_display.asp), [2004](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/PPF/r/156/report_display.asp), and [2006](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/PPF/r/190/report_display.asp). It is nice to see that when we returned to asking the more basic one-line question, it returns a similar result: 75% of internet users have looked for health or medical information online.

The Oct-Dec 2007 survey is also distinguished by the fact that we included a group of cell phone users in our sample. We believe this is an important part of capturing an accurate picture of the U.S. population since 14.5% of all American adults live in households with only wireless phones (see ["Polling in the age of cell phones"](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/PPF/r/250/report_display.asp)).

We will update our 17 health topic trend data in a survey to be fielded this fall and, if you are interested in more frequent updates, I am writing about my observations of the internet's impact on health care on the [e-patients.net](http://www.e-patients.net/) blog.