Abstract
The rapid growth of the use of new technologies is having an important effect on individuals’ health knowledge and behavior. The objective of this paper is to study the potential reduction in health care utilization associated with the expansion of new technologies. Using Spanish micro data from the Survey on the Equipment and Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT-H) in Households for 2014 we analyze information technologies equipment, availability of access and means of Internet connection per household. We model the probability of an individual being internet user in Spain as a function of a range of socio-economic characteristics, including individual’s gender, age, education and employment situation. Also, we hypothesized that a greater use of this communication technologies is related to a lesser health care expenditure.
Highlights
The rapid growth of the use of new technologies is having an important effect on individuals’ health knowledge and behavior
Since Arrow (1963) and Grossman (1972a, b), several papers have studied the relationship between socioeconomic factors and health care utilization (López-Casasnovas & Ribera, 2002; Cantarero & Pascual, 2005; Clavero-Barranquero & González-Álvarez, 2005; Gili Roca, Basu, McKee & Stuckler, 2013)
Our objective is to study whether socioeconomics characteristics can help to explain the relationship between new technologies and health care utilization in Spain, and to what extent
Summary
The rapid growth of the use of new technologies is having an important effect on individuals’ health knowledge and behavior. The fast growth of the use of new technologies is having an important effect on individuals’ health knowledge and behaviour. The starting point of this paper is the large and increasing proportion of the population that use Internet as a source of feasible health information. The decision making process underlying the demand is based on the individual’s perception of medical symptoms and the incentive towards action (Rivera, 2004). They show the lower the socioeconomic level, the higher the expected health care demand (with its corresponding remarks). As pointed for example by Suziedelyte (2012), previous empirical research analysing the effect of Internet health information on the demand for health care obtained inconclusive and inconsistent conclusions
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