The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Clicks, Care & Copays—How Each Generation Navigates Digital Healthcare” found a widening expectations gap across age groups. Young consumers use virtual visits and digital tools more often, and they want more digital options across the journey. Yet they report the most friction at the payment step.
Older consumers, by contrast, are more likely to stick with in-person care and traditional billing, but they also describe healthcare payments as relatively easy.
Taken together, the findings suggested that healthcare’s digital transformation is not mainly a clinical adoption problem. It is increasingly a workflow and payments problem.
- Virtual care divides by age. About 33% of zillennials said their most recent healthcare visit was virtual, compared with 5% of baby boomers. That gap signals two parallel care models operating at once, with younger patients treating virtual as normal and older patients treating it as optional.
- Payment friction hits young patients hardest, a 68% of Generation Z respondents encountered at least one payment barrier during their last healthcare payment experience, versus 18% of boomers. For providers and payors, that is a warning that digital-first does not mean payments-ready, even when digital wallets and app-based experiences are widely available.
- Ease rises with age, as 93% of baby boomers described their last healthcare payment as easy, while 62% of Gen Z said the same. The industry may be optimizing for the cohort that uses the least digital care, while underserving the cohort that is trying to use it most.
The report also filled in just why this gap matters for the digital economy. Young consumers are not only using more digital care; they are also making different choices about where and how they access it.
The report found that 27% of Gen Z patients visited urgent care in the last 90 days, more than triple the share of baby boomers, underscoring a preference for speed and convenience that digital channels can amplify.
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The report also suggested that patient portals are no longer the center of gravity for young cohorts. While 60% of consumers use digital healthcare tools overall, young groups are more active with scheduling apps, tracking tools and bill pay platforms, indicating that the digital healthcare experience is fragmenting into multiple touch points that need to connect cleanly.
Wearables add another layer. Daily use of health-monitoring devices clusters in a relatively narrow band across generations, at 15% to 21%, yet more than half of baby boomers never use these devices at all. That implies the opportunity is not just to deepen engagement among existing users, but to remove first-time adoption barriers for older patients without overwhelming them.
There are signs as to where demand may be headed. While 62% of boomers show no interest in any new health technology, 29% of Gen Z said they want digital or mobile payment options in the year ahead. In other words, the next competitive edge in digital health may be less about adding features and more about making payments work the first time, every time, across every channel.
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