What are the differences between the searches of “medical consultation” and “health consultation”?

A set of online diagnosis & remote health and medical consultation guidelines have been enacted in 2018. “Online diagnosis” has been growing at a rapid pace for the outbreak of COVID-19 that its awareness ratio exceeded 70%* in April 2020.

Meanwhile, the number of survey about “remote medical and health consultation” focusing of the provision of professional health and medical advice instead of “online diagnosis” aiming only at “medical diagnosis” over the Internet is, in fact, very much limited. This time, we would like to take a closer look at the demands from the searchers of “health consultation and “medical consultation”.

*LINE research survey media “Research Note”, as of February 17th, 2021
https://research-platform.line.me/archives/37188977.html
*Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, as of August 16th, 2021
https://www2.deloitte.com/jp/ja/pages/about-deloitte/articles/news-releases/nr20210816.html

First, let’s take a look at the changes in the number of “medical consultation” and “health consultation” searchers.

We can clearly see that the number of search of medical consultation and health consultation go up with the number of COVID-19 infection cases. The heightened interests of medical (health) consultations actually stem from the promotion of these consultation services when the public generally express concerns about their mental and physical health along with COVID-related information.

The two terms “medical consultation” and “health consultation” are very similar to each other, while users are more hooked to “medical consultation” that the number of users searched the keyword is almost twice as high as that of “health consultation”. If you are thinking about service development, it may be better to first focus on using the keyword “medical consultation” using the service name and SEO measures.

Now, let’s move on to check the user attributes of the searches “medical consultation” and “health consultation”.

Female searchers make up 55.3% of the total in “medical consultation” and 58.5% in “health consultation” so the fact is that female users generally show more interest when compared with male users.

When we look at the age of the searchers, we can see that users in their 30s show more interest in both “medical consultation” and “health consultation”. These users especially concern about health consultations indeed (a).

And now, let’s check out the respective age groups of “medical consultation” and “health consultation” (b).

“Medical consultation”…the number of searchers in 30s to 50s is especially high
“Health consultation”…the majority concentrates in 30s, while the working population (20s to 50s) also show higher concerns when compared to other groups.

And now, let’s check out the regions. (c)

The Kanto area generally shows higher concerns about medical consultation and health consultation when compared with other regions. We also see that the searchers especially concentrate on the Tokyo metropolitan area.

By looking at word networks, we can visualize the connections between different keywords. As keywords with a large number of cross-searches and strong relevance are connected by lines in word networks, we are able to grasp the potential (invisible) interests and concerns of users. Here is a comparison between the work networks of “medical consultation” and “health consultation”.

Searchers of “medical consultation” show strong interests and high concerns about “phone”, “free of charge”, “24 hours”, “credit cards”, and “Tokyo”; connected searches are “region name” and “contact method”. As for health consultation, keywords are “phone”, “free of charge”, “employment medical advisor”, and “LINE”.

An interesting insight we attained is searchers of “medical treatment” are interested in keywords like “online”, “Sunday”, “public holidays”, and “corona” that “medical treatment” are associated with “online” while “consultation” is linked with “phone”, “emails (and texts)” that the service provision is basically different. It’s our view that the public still haven’t been fully aware of what service they can enjoy over the Internet, or alternatively, the demands about “medical treatment” and “consultation service” are, after all, not the same.

Let’s look into the details of word crossings to see the demands more thoroughly.

“Phone” and “consultation counter” both rank high in medical consultation and health consultation. Nevertheless, we would say the search demands are a little different.

Take a quick look at the word crossing ranking of “health consultation”, we can see that “integrated hotline for mental health” and “mental health consultation” are on the list. As for “medical consultation”, “medical consultation phone service at night” and “24 hours” appear.
We consider “medical consultation” to be a generic and board. Meanwhile, the demands for mental health assistance as in “health consultation” is actually quite high.

Finally, we have also investigated the website searchers of “medical consultation” and “health consultation” visited after their search.

As we see it, the top 15 websites can be categorized into 2 groups- the consultation service of “administrative, local government” and “medical (health) consultation service”.

Consultation service of “administrative, local government” …
Top 1 is the page of “Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare” on where browsers can find information of health and medication consultation. Top 5 to 7, and 10 to 15 are the medical safety consultation pages of various local governments in the Kanto Area (Saitama, Kanagawa, Tokyo, and Chiba).

Medical (health) consultation service…
The 2nd, 4th, and 8th most visited sites are the service pages where browsers can actually use medical consultation services. Here, they are not simply browsing but using the services.
On the other hand, “MedionLife”, a page with information about various health consultation services, ranked the 3rd that revealed that users do want to explore their options.

An interesting insight is “Chiebukuro”, the free trivia sharing page offered by Yahoo! Japan and some private medical (health) consultation services also appeared on the ranking.

In our survey investigation about “medical (health) consultation this, we have come to know the following facts.

・There are more female searchers for both medical and health consultation than male searchers. The demands from searchers in their 30s is rather high.
・Regarding areas, people living in Tokyo have had the greatest number of search.
・Searchers of medical consultation and those of health consultation have similar interests, while the number of medical consultation is twice as large as that of health consultation, as reflected in the search conducted.
・For service name and SEO measure, it’s better to use the term medical consultation rather than health consultation (although it is best to use both).
・When compared with medical consultation, searches about health consultation is more associated with mental health.
・Regarding online consultation, the free services provided by the national and various local governments are the mainstream; demands on search platform is high.

The data in this investigation is from “Dockpit”, an analysis tool with online behavior log data and user demographic information under the permission of panelists in Japan presented by VALUES, Inc.

※The numbers of users are estimated by the data in the monitor and the internet population in Japan.