How often do doctors turn to Internet search engines for clinical info?
Do medical professionals find these engines easy to use?
Is the information available through search engines relevant and useful?

These are just a few of the questions SearchMedica.com sought to answer by asking 6000 doctors from five specialties for their opinions about the Internet, the resources they turn to most and search engines in particular. More than 900 usable survey responses were collected, and the key findings from primary care physicians (PCPs) reveal how medical professionals use and perceive these mainstream consumer search engines.

The nature of consumer search engines
Consumer search engines have become a way of life and the premier source for finding information on the Web. Consumer search engines pride themselves on reach and the comprehensiveness of their search results. They seek as much of the Web as possible, enabling consumers to identify obscure Internet resources with pinpoint accuracy through specific, targeted searches.

Survey results show that for medical professionals, consumer search engines available today cover too much of the Web, garnering irrelevant results and incorrect information. When it comes to searching for reliable, trustworthy and useful professional clinical resources, there’s an overwhelming desire among medical professionals for specialty search engines that target results from credible medical organizations.

Medical professionals turn to Google most often
Surveys revealed 77.6 percent of PCPs use the Internet frequently to find clinical information. That number grew to 91.2 percent among PCPs who were 45 or younger.

When turning to the Web for clinical content, surveyed medical professionals begin in different places. Nearly 65 percent of PCPs go to a specific Web site to get started; while the remainder begins their quest for clinical content at a search engine.

Among all specialties surveyed, Google was the overwhelming search engine of choice, with 51.1 percent of PCPs turning to the site. Why Google? The most popular answer among responding PCPs (42.7 percent) was because it is a good starting point.

Too many irrelevant results
Google’s reach has not gone unnoticed, helping the Internet’s most popular search engine build a huge base of loyal users, advertisers, and happy shareholders. From the perspective of medical professionals, however, this broad appeal and the expansive reach of Google’s crawling technology have created crowded sets of search results.

When asked about the main challenge medical professionals face when using Google, 65.4 percent of PCPs cited too many irrelevant results. 18.3 percent of PCPs cited not enough clinical information as a distant second main challenge.

These findings illustrate the difficulty of finding reliable clinical information via consumer search engines, a cumbersome and time-consuming task for medical professionals today. The unregulated nature of the Internet also brings other problems to light. Since anyone can post any information on the Web, validation of content and its claims is an important consideration.

Fraudulent patient testimonials, for example, are not uncommon on the Web. Blogs, often based solely on the opinion of one person, are yet another questionable online source of medical information, where individuals can post thoughts regardless of their merit or truth. Wikis like Wikipedia, although still relatively new developments, take this a step further. Wikis allow users to collaborate in forming the content of a Web site and police one another. People posting content do not even need to be site administrators, which raises questions about the reliability of the information.

Consumer search engines index testimonials, blogs, and wikis in the same manner that credible medical information is indexed—paying little attention to the source of that information or the possibility that the source may have been compensated or may be holding some other type of bias.

Medical professionals want more trustworthy, relevant resources
Not surprisingly, more than 90 percent of doctors surveyed said they would be interested in a search tool that delivers content only from Web sites pre-screened as authoritative sources. When asked about their interest in various services that could be provided on a Web site, a handful of overwhelming preferences emerged.

Full-text journal articles caught the interest of PCPs, with 85.6 percent indicating interest. More than 90 percent of respondents expressed interest in comprehensive drug and prescribing information, as well as review articles with evidence-based medicine citations and applicable authoritative guidelines.

Throughout the survey responses, a consistent desire for relevant and authoritative medical information emerged, and it’s no wonder. The expansive reach of consumer search engines indexes many of these resources, but doctors clearly don’t want to spend hours in search of that elusive needle in the haystack of information created for the layman.

Cyndy Finnie is senior product manager for SearchMedica.com, a free, Web-based service that connects physicians and other medical professionals to credible, medical Web sites and online journals through vertical or specialty-specific search engines including SearchMedica Primary Care, Psychiatry and Oncology. She can be reached at cfinnie@cmp.com.