The Impact of Health Information Privacy Concerns on Engagement and Payment Behaviors in Online Health Communities

Abstract

Online health communities (OHCs) have enjoyed increasing popularity in recent years, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, several concerns have been raised regarding the privacy of users’ personal information in OHCs. Considering that OHCs are a type of data-sharing or data-driven platform, it is crucial to determine whether users’ health information privacy concerns influence their behaviors in OHCs. Thus, by conducting a survey, this study explores the impact of users’ health information privacy concerns on their engagement and payment behavior (Paid) in OHCs. The empirical results show that users’ concerns about health information privacy reduce their Paid in OHCs by negatively influencing their OHC engagement. Further analysis reveals that if users have higher benefit appraisals (i.e., perceived informational and emotional support from OHCs) and lower threat appraisals (i.e., perceived severity and vulnerability of information disclosure from OHCs), the negative effect of health information privacy concerns on users’ OHC engagement will decrease.

Impact of IT identity on consumer negatively-valenced engagement in mobile medical consultation: from consumer experience perspective

“…Besides, grounded in trust theory, SOR theory or signal theory, a majority of current studies on MMC primarily explore how physician-related (Li et al, 2020a), technology-related (Dogra et al, 2022), self-related (Chen et al, 2022b;Wu et al, 2022a), third-party patient-related (Li et al, 2021), disease-related (Shah et al, 2021) factors influence consumer positively valenced engagement in MMC from patient-physician interaction perspective or patienttechnology interaction perspective. As the MMC platform is a technological bridge for doctorpatient interaction, uncovering the factors that influence consumer negative engagement in MMC from a patient-platform interaction lens is needed.…”

“…Particularly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, MMC use has increased dramatically due to help reduce the risk of cross-infection for patients with mild illnesses (Goyal et al, 2021). Despite its popularity and potential advantages, consumers are not always willing to actively engage with MMC services (Wu et al, 2022a;Cao et al, 2022) and the adoption rate of MMC is relatively low in China (Zheng et al, 2022), limiting the promotion of MMC services and jeopardizing the effectiveness and sustainability of the MMC platforms (Yang et al, 2019). Thus, going beyond the initial usage perspective to further unravel why consumers express negatively-valenced engagement in using MMC services during the post-consumption stage is needed.…”

“…Given the negative impact of negatively-valenced engagement on the long-term development of MMC (Jiang et al, 2021a), researchers, albeit few, started to pay attention to this issue, but they addressed it by investigating the influencing factors for positivelyvalenced engagement. For example, Wu et al (2022a) and Yang et al (2021) have pointed out that some patients may be reluctant to engage in MMC due to privacy concerns and a lack of trust. However, some scholars believe that negatively-valenced engagement can be a dimension that is different from positively-valenced engagement because the reasons behind positively-valenced engagement may be different from those behind negatively-valenced engagement (Um and Lau, 2018).…”

The Impact of Data Vulnerability in Online Health Communities: An Institutional Assurance Perspective

“…In the OHC environment, data vulnerability indicates that the users feel insecure, vulnerable, and exposed since the OHCs have their personal health data, including disease-related information and medical records. This perception of vulnerability makes OHC users feel susceptible ( Martin et al, 2017 ), because the leaks of these data can result in reputation damage, mental stress, embarrassment, blackmail, disease discrimination, and identity theft ( Slepchuk et al, 2022 ; Sun et al, 2022 ; Wu et al, 2022 ). Hence, the OHC users may not feel comfortable providing their sensitive data to the OHCs.…”

“…Hence, the OHC users may not feel comfortable providing their sensitive data to the OHCs. In addition, the OHCs that have users’ medical data can also suffer a security lapse, such as data breach, which put the users in a risky situation ( Wu et al, 2022 ). Consequently, a high level of data vulnerability indicates that OHC users are concerned their personal data will be associated with great unauthorized access and illegal use ( Dinev et al, 2013 ; Sun et al, 2022 ).…”