I posted a while back on Manhattan Research’s new Cybercitizen health findings. In the past week I’ve received Forrester Research’s Healthcare First Look email and also seen a new article from Caroline Broder at iHealthBeat on Manhattan research’s eHealth findings. Forrester focuses on Rx sites and on physician sites.  The results are predictable.  There is good information on Rx sites, but consumers don’t trust drug companies as a source.  They’d rather see it from their own doctor or from a medical specialty society.  But the doctors don’t have a web site or if they do, only 6% of consumers have been to see it.

Manhattan concentrates on consumer use of the eHealth space generally and their intersections with health plan sites in particular.  And like in Forrester’s previous research on the topic, health plan sites are little used and not very functional. Around 20% use their health plan’s site, and are in general dissapointed with what they can do there.  Manhattan though believes that health plan sites are getting better and starting to incorporate more useful functionality. As regular readers know, I was trying to sell software to health plans to help them do this from 2000-2002 and we were well ahead of the market.  Nice to hear that they’re slowly moving in the right direction.