Background

About ten years ago, an age-related digital divide was identified, where ‘the elderly’ denoted a group of people at risk of losing the benefits of a digital society. The aims of this work are to find a relationship between self-assessed health and internet use by older people in European countries and to ascertain whether this relationship differs in countries with a more developed eHealth policy.

Materials and methods

An ordered logistic regression is estimated for all countries in the sample and for two countries subsets which differ in their eHealth performance. Individual data is collected by SHARE. The classifying criterion of eHealth performance is based on the ‘eHealth’ policy dimension of the indicator used to construct the Digital Economy and Society Index. The average marginal effects are computed for the variable of internet use.

Results

Results show that older people who use the internet tend to report better health status. This relationship however may not hold for low levels of health and it is stronger in countries with low eHealth performance.

Conclusion

Policy measures on eHealth not only contribute to people’s health but also help to alleviate critical situations such as the one created by the Covid-19 pandemic.

中文翻译：

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欧洲老年人自我评估的健康状况以及互联网使用情况。

背景

大约十年前，人们发现了与年龄有关的数字鸿沟，其中“老年人”表示一群人有可能失去数字社会的利益。这项工作的目的是要找到欧洲国家老年人自我评估的健康状况与互联网使用之间的关系，并确定这种关系在电子卫生政策更加发达的国家中是否有所不同。

材料和方法

对于样本中的所有国家以及其电子卫生保健绩效不同的两个国家子集，估计了有序逻辑回归。个人数据由SHARE收集。电子卫生保健绩效的分类标准基于用于构建数字经济和社会指数的指标的“电子卫生保健”政策维度。计算互联网使用变量的平均边际效应。

结果

结果表明，使用互联网的老年人倾向于报告更好的健康状况。但是，这种关系可能不适用于健康水平低下的情况，在电子卫生保健绩效低下的国家中，这种关系会更强。

结论

有关电子卫生保健的政策措施不仅有助于人们的健康，而且还有助于缓解紧急情况，例如Covid-19大流行所造成的情况。