Improving Individual Acceptance of Health Clouds through Confidentiality Assurance.

BACKGROUND: Cloud computing promises to essentially improve healthcare delivery performance. However, shifting sensitive medical records to third-party cloud providers could create an adoption hurdle because of security and privacy concerns.

OBJECTIVES: This study examines the effect of confidentiality assurance in a cloud-computing environment on individuals' willingness to accept the infrastructure for inter-organizational sharing of medical data.

METHODS: We empirically investigate our research question by a survey with over 260 full responses. For the setting with a high confidentiality assurance, we base on a recent multi-cloud architecture which provides very high confidentiality assurance through a secret-sharing mechanism: Health information is cryptographically encoded and distributed in a way that no single and no small group of cloud providers is able to decode it.

RESULTS: Our results indicate the importance of confidentiality assurance in individuals' acceptance of health clouds for sensitive medical data. Specifically, this finding holds for a variety of practically relevant circumstances, i.e., in the absence and despite the presence of conventional offline alternatives and along with pseudonymization. On the other hand, we do not find support for the effect of confidentiality assurance in individuals' acceptance of health clouds for non-sensitive medical data. These results could support the process of privacy engineering for health-cloud solutions.