In this digital age, the ability to readily search for information related to our healthcare has never been greater. How does this change as we age? What is the impact of location on our search habits? Does time of day matter? What role does gender play?
A recent study from Castlight Health, a first-of-its-kind analysis, drills down into the search behaviors for U.S. employees, slicing and dicing this data according to age, gender, region, and time of day. This study has uncovered worthwhile insights that lie in seemingly common search patterns – ones that translate into strategic, data-driven decisions that can help you optimize your benefit strategy and employee engagement programs.
Below are five key insights from our analysis of U.S. employees healthcare search behaviors:
- Time of day matters: When seeking healthcare information, most employees do so during the day, with 66 percent of women’s searches and 63 percent of men’s searches happening during work hours. The exception? Men between the ages of 20-24 and 30-34 are three times as likely to search for healthcare information in the wee hours of the night, especially if they’re from the Midwest.
- Family first: When it comes to both family planning and family care, where employees live matters. In the Midwest, Mountain West, and South Atlantic, searches for maternity-related topics occurred earlier — between the ages of 25-29 — compared to women in the Northeast, Pacific West and South Central states, whose searches for maternity occurred later on, between the ages of 30-34.
- Location, location, location: Employees in the South Atlantic and Central states, often referred to as “the heart attack belt”, were almost three times as likely as employees in the rest of the country to search for weight loss surgery and obesity-related health issues. But, from Portland to San Diego, acupuncture and a long massage just might be what the doctor ordered, with women on the West Coast searching for a naturopathic doctor and massage therapy more than women from every other region across the country combined.
- Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: While men are more apt to use colloquial or natural language when searching – think “tell me where it hurts” – women are more likely to use formal terminology. For example, while men’s searches include specific problems or body parts (“rash”, “tooth”), women’s searches align more closely with doctors’ terminology (“colposcopy”, “laparoscopic fibroid removal”).
- Age is only a [telling] number: It’s no surprise that what employees search for changes as they age. What are men and women looking for across generations? (Figure 1).
Women in their 20s are shifting their focus from birth control to breast pumps while moving through the decade. Men, ages 35-44, have vasectomies top of mind. Prostate surgery is the search focus for men in their 50s, whereas women, ages 55-64, are concerned with bone density and understanding their risk factors for osteoporosis.
How can employers use this information to improve healthcare across the board?
When armed with the right information and technology solutions, employers can use data to inform better choices for their employees, their business, and the healthcare industry as a whole.
For example, in looking at how health information is searched for based on age group, employers can better understand their employee population’s healthcare needs at various stages in their careers (whether or not that information is included in a medical claim) and optimize their healthcare benefit strategy.
Employers spend $620 billion on enterprise healthcare annually, yet more than 30 percent of that spend is wasted. With enterprise healthcare management, wasted healthcare costs can be turned into a strategic business advantage, and the savings can be put toward increasing employees’ salaries and investing in technology innovation.
Want to learn more about how U.S. employees are searching for health data? Check out the infographic, and try our interactive search analysis tool to make discoveries of your own.
