A Research company (Manhattan Research) have just published the results of a survey of just over 3000 adults in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain who were already interested in on-line health information, about their attitudes to on-line information on medicines.
Just under half of those surveyed (43%) wanted to be able to access pharma websites about conditions and diseases. 40% did want more information from pharma as long as it did not reach them on Facebook or Twitter!
When analysing the survey response data by country, Italian consumers were most likely to seek pharma related information on-line and German consumers least so. The researchers were also able to analyse the results by the condition the consumers showed interest in, and acute pain, osteoporosis and arrhythmia showed a higher interest level than the average on-line health consumer.
This research suggest that there is an opportunity for pharma to develop more information resources on-line although they should also not forget that pharmacists and doctors also need access to such such information, and ideally they should receive it well before the information is made widely available to the general public