360DigitalInfluence

It is often said in the world of healthcare that nurses are the underappreciated heroes. They are the ones that often spend the most time with patients, have a huge direct influence on the care that a patient gets, and sit at the center of the health care world influencing both the physicians and the patients.

To underscore this importance, Manhattan Research recently released a report about nurses online noting that approximately three out of four U.S. nurses recommend health websites to patients. The study notes that the average nurse spends eight hours per week online for professional purposes, which is just as much time as physicians, and almost all of them use the Internet in between patient consultations. Nurses are also proactive in researching medical product information specifically online - over eighty percent have visited a pharma, biotech, or device company website in the past year.

In addition to the prevalence of the Internet as a research and patient communication tool, nurses are continuing to find their unique voices online through a growing number of prominent nursing blogs such as Codeblog and Emergiblog which both share powerful stories of healthcare from the nurses’ point of view. These nursing blogs are very popular in the nursing community and are humanizing the profession (and healthcare in general) to a much wider audience of patients.   The rapid growth of online nursing communities such as AllNurses and NurseConnect is yet another sign of the growing use of the web.
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