An empirical study of patients' privacy concerns for health informatics as a service

Abstract The combination of two frontier technologies, health informatics and cloud computing, is known as Health Informatics as a Service (HIaaS). Considering the importance of privacy issues in HIaaS context, we empirically investigated the antecedents and consequences of patients' information privacy concerns for HIaaS in this paper. An integrated framework that consists of multiple dimensions of privacy concern antecedents and consequences is proposed and validated. Structural equation modeling method was employed to estimate the significance of the path coefficients. Five antecedent factors at different levels influence patients' privacy concern for HIaaS, including privacy awareness (patient level), perceived informativeness (service level), information sensitivity (information contingency), regulatory expectations (macro-environmental level), and importance of information transparency (organizational level). Privacy concern for HIaaS significantly affects patients' trust belief, perceived privacy risk, and adoption intention. This study is among the first to investigate privacy issues in an understudied context – HIaaS, which is different from extant HIaaS literature from conceptual and technological perspectives. In addition, this research provides a more holistic picture about the formation and consequence of patients' information privacy concerns.