The Increasing Impact of eHealth on Physician Behavior Online information is influencing diagnosis , treatments and prescribing

While health care prognosticators have been conducting postmortems of failed ehealth startups and speculating about the impediments to ehealth,doctors have been steadily adding the Internet to their medical bag of tools. A new study by The Boston Consulting Group indicates that a large percentage of doctors are using the Web and finding that it has a major impact on their medical knowledge, their efficiency, and the care they provide to patients. These latest findings—which build on BCG’s analysis in Vital Signs: The Impact of eHealth on Patients and Physicians (February 2001)—yield several unexpected and important conclusions about physicians’ use of the Internet: