Baby Boomers and Seniors Make Big Gains in Online Healthcare and Digital Engagement

Among the last holdouts in healthcare’s digital shift are baby boomers and seniors, but new data shows that these groups, who previously reported high levels of tech aversion, are turning the corner and managing more aspects of their healthcare online.

Implications for this shift are enormous as an overburdened and understaffed U.S. healthcare system coming out of the COVID emergency needs its own relief, and large patient populations doing more self-directed care online help provide it with fewer phone calls and office visits.

The latest news on this front comes from the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, which released the results of its National Poll on Healthy Aging on May 24. It confirms in broad strokes what new PYMNTS research finds in deeper detail: that Americans aged 50 to 80 increased their use of online health portals during the pandemic.

According to the University of Michigan poll, 78% of Americans between 50 and 80 years of age use at least one online portal to manage care, and nearly half of the sample (49%) use more than one. For context, only 51% said they used a healthcare portal in the 2018 poll.

What the University of Michigan poll also confirmed is that large numbers of older Americans find using and navigating portals often confusing, with one in four saying they would benefit from training in how to use the existing crop of healthcare portals, many of which are outdated.

Another way of simplifying the consumer experience is a unified platform approach that obviates the need for patients to track their health status using multiple platforms.

Exploring that important difference in the May study The Digital Platform Promise: What Baby Boomers and Seniors Want From Digital Healthcare Platforms, a PYMNTS and Lynx collaboration, we found that 64% of baby boomers and seniors conducted at least one digital healthcare activity in the last year. Moreover, the study states, “65% indicated some interest in unified platforms, and 24% stated they are highly interested — equivalent to approximately 55 million and 20 million U.S. consumers, respectively.”

To close the gap for older patients using online technology — many managing multiple chronic conditions across multiple portals — a unified approach is gaining favor. Unified portals “let consumers make payments, conveniently interact with providers and insurers, manage their prescription and pharmaceutical needs, access detailed information about their benefits and much more,” according to this study of more than 2,500 U.S. consumers.

While showing less enthusiasm than younger digital natives, 24% of baby boomers and seniors still expressed high interest in using unified digital platforms. As the study states, “This reflects 20 million U.S. consumers who have much greater aggregate healthcare needs than their younger counterparts. Deploying unified digital platforms would be incredibly impactful to this group. Moreover, 65% of baby boomers and seniors — 55 million consumers in total — show at least some interest in unified digital healthcare platforms.”

In what could be called a positive side effect of the pandemic, older Americans took to digital in droves as lockdowns made going to the doctor burdensome and a bit scary. With appointments now harder to get, sometimes scheduling months out, unified portals are a timely innovation.

The Aging of Digital Transformation

The increase in baby boomers and seniors using online health portals is part of a larger shift to digital channels that PYMNTS has organized into 37 activities organized across 10 pillars of the connected economy comprising PYMNTS’ ConnectedEconomy Index (CE Index) that benchmarks the ongoing digital transformation of the world’s economy.

In the Q1 2023 edition of How the World Does Digital: Daily Digital Engagement Hits New Heights, published in May, data shows, as the study stated, that “older consumers ramped up digital engagement at over twice the rate of their younger peers,” adding that “Generation X, baby boomers and seniors posted outsized gains, with their average increase in digital engagement at least double that of their younger peers.”

These findings include healthcare as part of the “Be Well” pillar, although the “How the World Does Digital” study series is more concerned with overall digital engagement across all pillars and activities. Simply stated, the more people in each economy who engage in digital activities across all 10 pillars, the higher the digital transformation index score of that nation/economy.

Until recently, baby boomers and seniors were less likely to be engaging in digital activities than younger demographic cohorts. In the 2022 study Benchmarking the World’s Digital Transformation, a PYMNTS and Stripe collaboration noted, “The countries whose populations across all age groups — particularly older ones — are more digitally engaged show more progress. Singapore’s elderly are engaged, and Japan’s are less so, which goes a long way toward explaining the big difference between the digital engagement of the populations in those two countries. Digital transformation has to include all age groups, not just millennials and members of Generation Z.”