Factors Influencing Patients' Attitudes to Exchange Electronic Health Information in Saudi Arabia: An Exploratory Study

Health Information Exchange (HIE) systems electronically transfer patients' clinical, demographic, and health-related information between different care providers. These exchanges offer improved health care quality, reduced medical errors and health care costs, increase patient safety and organizational efficiency. However, technologies cannot bring such improvements if patients are reluctant to share personal health information which could impede the success of HIE system. The purpose of this study is to identify different factors that determine patients' acceptance for sharing their medical information among different care provider. Based preliminary on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) combined with patients' perspective an integrated model is proposed. A questionnaire survey is conducted to measure the proportion of respondents' willingness to share their information with the residence of the eastern province of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A sample of 300 respondents over 18 years of age is collected. Basic descriptive statistical analysis, reliability and validity assessment is conducted to analyze data and measure the goodness of model. Furthermore, Structural Equation Modelling is used to test research hypothesis. The finding shows that perceived benefit, perceived risk, subjective norms and attitude are the main predictors of patients' willingness or unwillingness to share their health information. The study revealed that more attention should be directed to these factors during the design and implementation of future HIE system to avoid expected barriers.