van Kessel Robin, Kyriopoulos Ilias, Mastylak Alicja, Mossialos Elias
LSE Health, Department of Health Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom.
Department of International Health, Care and Public Health Research Institute (CAPHRI), Maastricht University, The Netherlands.
PLOS Digit Health. 2023 May 1;2(5):e0000241. doi: 10.1371/journal.pdig.0000241. eCollection 2023 May.
Public interest is an important component influencing the likelihood of successfully implementing digital healthcare. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic allowed us to assess how public interest in digital health changed in response to disruptions in traditional health services. In this study, we used a difference-in-differences approach to determine how digital healthcare search behavior shifted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the same period in 2019 across six English-speaking countries: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, and Ireland. In most cases, we observed that the official declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic on 11 March 2020 was associated with a significant overall increase in the volume of digital healthcare searches. We also found notable heterogeneity between countries in terms of the keywords that were used to search for digital healthcare, which could be explained by linguistic differences across countries or the different national digital health landscapes. Since online searches could be an initial step in the pathway to accessing health services, future studies should investigate under what circumstances increased public interest translates into demand for and utilization of digital healthcare.
公众利益是影响数字医疗成功实施可能性的一个重要因素。新冠疫情的爆发使我们能够评估公众对数字健康的兴趣如何随着传统医疗服务的中断而发生变化。在本研究中，我们采用了双重差分法来确定在新冠疫情爆发的最初几个月里，与2019年同期相比，六个英语国家（美国、加拿大、英国、新西兰、澳大利亚和爱尔兰）的数字医疗搜索行为是如何转变的。在大多数情况下，我们观察到2020年3月11日新冠疫情的官方宣布与数字医疗搜索量的显著总体增加有关。我们还发现，各国在用于搜索数字医疗的关键词方面存在显著差异，这可能是由各国语言差异或不同的国家数字健康格局所解释的。由于在线搜索可能是获取医疗服务途径的第一步，未来的研究应该调查在何种情况下，公众兴趣的增加会转化为对数字医疗的需求和使用。
