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Evaluating people’s concern about their health information privacy based on power-responsibility equilibrium model: A case of Taiwan

  • Systems-Level Quality Improvement
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Abstract

To address the issue of rising expenditure of healthcare service and to fulfill the skyrocketing demand for quality healthcare, the electronic medical records (EMR) exchange has become a vital and indispensable solution for healthcare facilities in terms of being able to share medical information among healthcare providers. Hence, EMR exchange was expected to improve the quality of healthcare and reduce the cost of repetitive medical check-ups and unnecessary treatments. However, recent reports affirming EMR data leaks and compromises have ignited major worldwide privacy concerns over the security of the EMR systems. How to effectively diminish patients’ concern for EMR privacy has thus become an important issue that healthcare institution managers/stakeholders have to address urgently. This study leverages the power-responsibility equilibrium perspective to investigate the antecedents and consequences of concerns for the EMR exchange. A survey using 391 responses collected from medical centers, regional and district hospitals in Taiwan was used to conduct this study. The results show that government regulations have a positive effect on hospital privacy policies. Furthermore, both government regulations and hospital privacy policy are negatively associated with concern for EMR information privacy. Additional reports gathered from this study also showed that concern for EMR information privacy could result in patients’ protective responses including refusal to provide personal health information (PHI), removal of PHI, negative word of mouth, complaining directly to the hospital, or complaining indirectly to third-party organizations. These findings demonstrate the need for healthcare facilities to formulate robust privacy policies in order to alleviate patients’ concern for EMR information privacy based on governmental regulations. This regulation is top-priority as the incapability of reducing patients’ concern for EMR information privacy may lead to the collapse of the campaign for the full-adoption of EMR or possibly jeopardize the promotion and application of EMR among healthcare facilities.

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Funding

This work has been supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology (Grant no. NSC100–2410-H-009-012-MY2), Taiwan, R.O.C.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Management, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 University Rd, Hsinchu, 30010, Taiwan

    Hsin-Ginn Hwang & Yun Lin

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  1. Hsin-Ginn Hwang
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  2. Yun Lin
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Correspondence to Yun Lin.

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All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Verbal informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Hwang, HG., Lin, Y. Evaluating people’s concern about their health information privacy based on power-responsibility equilibrium model: A case of Taiwan. J Med Syst 44, 112 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-020-01579-6

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