Previously submitted to: Online Journal of Public Health Informatics (no longer under consideration since Jul 16, 2025)
Date Submitted: Dec 15, 2024
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A survey of Chronic diseases patients’ online health information searching behavior
ABSTRACT
Background:
In China, the government has taken hypertension and diabetes (referred to as “two chronic diseases” ) as an opportunity to implement a hierarchical diagnosis and treatment system, and encouraged the "Internet plus health care" methodology to manage these two diseases.
Objective:
This study aims to explore the internet health information searching behavior of “two chronic diseases” patients.
Methods:
A total of 2894 “two chronic diseases” patients were included in this analysis. The Kruskal-Wallis test and a multivariate mean were used to test the evaluation and access paths of patients’ online health information search, and multinomial logistic regression was used to explore the factors influencing online health information searching behavior.
Results:
61% of the respondents sometimes searched for online health information. WeChat and TikTok were the main platforms for health information searching. Respondents who “sometimes” searched for online health information rated the average quality of disease symptom information significantly lower (p=.02) and lifestyle information significantly higher (p=.00) than those who had “ever” searched for online health information. There was a significant difference in the perceived importance between the two groups (p=.00). Male, educated, employed, severe patients, and given a high-quality evaluation patients were more likely to search online health information.
Conclusions:
The Internet and social media are important information sources for hypertension and diabetic patients. Our findings indicate online health information plays an important role in chronic disease management, it addresses that the quality of chronic disease health information on the internet should be evaluated and monitored. Clinical Trial: None
Citation
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