Exploring Privacy Perception of Customers on RFID-Enabled Healthcare

Abstract

The RFID technology has been frequently voiced in the media with the expectations to improve healthcare quality. Despite with its salient features in identification and tracking, the adoption remains slow in the healthcare sector. Much of the literature attributes the slow adoption to technological factors (e.g., read accuracy) and costs, as well as the potential influence of privacy infringement on healthcare customers. To realize how healthcare users will respond to the RFID technology, this investigation conducts a pretest-posttest experiment to understand how customers trade-off non-quantifiable factors of healthcare service quality that may exhibit only subtle differences in an RFID-enabled environment. The finding revealed that perceived privacy concern was significantly heightened in RFID-enabled scenarios, which experimentally confirms the existence of the privacy concen. Another finding revealed that no significant difference existed between an information-privacy-invading scenario and a location-privacy-invading scenario, indicating the equal risk of both types of privacy infringements. Other factors were found to have significant relations to perceived privacy concern, including the level of RFID knowledge, age, and educational background. Based on these findings, some practical suggestions are offered to alleviate the customers' risky perceptions towards a convenient but threatening RFID healthcare environment.