Last week, the California HealthCare Foundation released a new “Snapshot” report titled, “Just Looking: Consumer Use of the Internet to Manage Care.” It’s a great title–not only clever but descriptive of what seems to be going on in California right now.

Although a majority of Californians are using the Internet to search for answers to their health questions, only between 1 in 10 and 1 in 8 are using it to fill a prescription, communicate with a clinician, or make an appointment. Between one quarter and one third of Californians are using the Web to find a physician, assess clinicians, or review benefits or claims information.

These data are hardly a surprise and are very much in keeping with what is going on around the country. Why is the Internet still mostly being used this way?

Certainly, much of it is due to the inadequate connection between consumers’ lives of on the Web and their lives in their doctors’ offices. We know from the Pew Internet Project that–when clinicians ignore consumers’ queries generated by Internet searching–frustrated consumers don’t stop searching, they just keep what they’re doing from their doctors.

The moment in care when a consumer is searching for information is the perfect time to connect him or her to some other health care management resource–whether human or electronic. We need to figure out how to weave those connections into the care delivery process. We also need to figure out that we can make sure that the content they find is understandable, meaningful and actionable to consumers.

That’s part of what makes an information therapy (Ix) “killer app”–which is one of the highlights of the 7th Annual Ix Conference, “WIxRED: Next-Generation Patient-Centered Care.” In the Killer Apps session, James Hereford (EVP of Strategic Services & Quality at Group Health Cooperative in Seattle) and Susan Edgman-Levitan (who runs Mass General’s Stoeckle Center for Primary Care Innovation in Boston) will share both their visions and their experiences with implementing such Ix initiatives in very different real-world settings.