BACKGROUND
The mobile health (mHealth) provides a new opportunity for patients’ disease prediction and health self-management. At the same time, privacy problems in mHealth have brought forth significant attention concerning patients' online health information disclosure and hindered mHealth development.
OBJECTIVE
Privacy calculus theory (PCT) has been widely used to understand personal information disclosure behaviors with the basic assumption of a national and linear decision-making process. However, people’s cognitive behavior processes are complex and mutual. In attempting to close this knowledge gap, we further optimize the information disclosure model of patients based on PCT by identifying the mutual relationship between costs (privacy concerns) and benefits. Social support, which has been proved to be a distinct and significant disclosure benefit of mHealth, was chosen to be the representative benefit of information disclosure in mHealth.
METHODS
From an individual perspective, a structural equation model with privacy concerns, health information disclosure intention in mHealth, and social support from mHealth has been examined.
RESULTS
253 randomly selected participants provided validated questionnaire. The result indicated that perceived health information sensitivity positively enhances the privacy concern (0.505, p<0.01), and higher privacy concern levels will decrease the health information disclosure intention (-0.338, p<0.01). Various aspects of individual characters influence perceived health information sensitivity in different ways. The informational support has a negatively moderate on reduce the positive effect between perceived health information sensitivity and privacy concerns (-0.171, p<0.1) and will decrease the negative effect between privacy concerns and health information disclosure intention(-0.105, p<0.1). However, emotional support has no directly moderate effect on both privacy concerns and health information disclosure intention.
CONCLUSIONS
The results indicate that social support can be regarded as a disutility reducer, that is, on the one hand, it reduces the privacy concerns of patients; on the other hand, it also reduces the negative impact of privacy concerns on information disclosure intention. Moreover, the moderate effect of social support is partially supported. Informational support, one demission of social support, is significant, while the other demission, emotional support, is not significant in mHealth. Furthermore, the results are different among patients with different individual characteristics. This study also provides specific theoretical and practical implications to enhance the development of mHealth.
