Since one-quarter of adults do not go online, the percentage of health seekers is lower among the total population: 59% of adults in the U.S. look online for health information.

Women, non-Hispanic whites, younger adults, and those with higher levels of education and income are more likely than other demographic groups to gather health information online.

There are two forces at play in the data: access to the internet and interest in health information. For example, women and men are equally likely to have access to the internet, but women are more likely than men to report gathering health information online, which explains the gender gap in the chart below.

For the other groups, the rate of internet adoption combined with their level of interest in health information drives their numbers either up or down. This is particularly true when it comes to education: only 38% of adults with less than a high school education go online, compared with 93% of adults with a college degree. Once online, 62% of internet users who have not graduated from high school say they gather health information online, compared with 89% of internet users with a college degree. The result is a significant gap in information access: just one in four adults who lack high school diplomas gather health information online, compared with eight in ten college graduates.

Adults who, in the past 12 months, have provided unpaid care for a loved one are among the most likely people to have looked online for health information of all kinds (see table below). Caregivers are not only often in need of health information but have the means to obtain it online: eight in ten have access to the internet.

Another group with reason to seek health information online are people who faced a serious medical emergency or crisis in the past year, either their own or that of someone close them. Medical crises crop up in many people’s lives, across demographic groups, so there is little difference between the groups when it comes to internet access. The internet once again distinguishes itself for these users as a just-in-time information resource.²

Interestingly, a third group – people who have experienced any other significant change in their physical health in the past year, such as gaining or losing a lot of weight, becoming pregnant, or quitting smoking –  do not report a higher rate of health information seeking compared with other people.

As the Pew Internet Project and the California HealthCare Foundation have reported in the past, people who are living with chronic disease or disability are likely, if they have internet access, to be highly interested in online health information. For those two groups, it is their lack of access to the internet which holds them back from parity with people who report no chronic conditions.