The Association Between Internet Use and Ambulatory Care-Seeking Behaviors in Taiwan: A Cross-Sectional Study

Compared with the traditional ways of gaining health-related information from newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, the Internet is inexpensive, accessible, and conveys diverse opinions. Several studies on how increasing Internet use affected outpatient clinic visits were inconclusive. The o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of medical Internet research 2016-12, Vol.18 (12), p.e319-e319
Main Authors: Hsieh, Ronan Wenhan, Chen, Likwang, Chen, Tsung-Fu, Liang, Jyh-Chong, Lin, Tzu-Bin, Chen, Yen-Yuan, Tsai, Chin-Chung
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Age
Ambulatory care
Ambulatory Care - methods
Ambulatory Care - utilization
Ambulatory Care Facilities
Ambulatory health care
Behavior
Chronic illnesses
Cross-Sectional Studies
Female
Health Behavior
Health care
Health services utilization
Health status
Help seeking behavior
Humans
Internet
Internet - utilization
Male
Medical personnel
Middle Aged
Missing data
Original Paper
Outpatient care facilities
Population
Propensity
Questionnaires
Radio
Regression analysis
Sociology
Surveys and Questionnaires
Taiwan
Television
Variables
Visits
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Summary:Compared with the traditional ways of gaining health-related information from newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, the Internet is inexpensive, accessible, and conveys diverse opinions. Several studies on how increasing Internet use affected outpatient clinic visits were inconclusive. The objective of this study was to examine the role of Internet use on ambulatory care-seeking behaviors as indicated by the number of outpatient clinic visits after adjusting for confounding variables. We conducted this study using a sample randomly selected from the general population in Taiwan. To handle the missing data, we built a multivariate logistic regression model for propensity score matching using age and sex as the independent variables. The questionnaires with no missing data were then included in a multivariate linear regression model for examining the association between Internet use and outpatient clinic visits. We included a sample of 293 participants who answered the questionnaire with no missing data in the multivariate linear regression model. We found that Internet use was significantly associated with more outpatient clinic visits (P=.04). The participants with chronic diseases tended to make more outpatient clinic visits (P
ISSN:1438-8871
1439-4456
1438-8871
DOI:10.2196/jmir.5498