JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Health consumers are expected to access not only public health information but also share personal health information for informed decision-making. As the U.S. healthcare system moves toward consumer-centered care, how individual health consumers are ready and capable of flowing self-health data across various care contexts has accompanied the national discussion. However, individuals’ information-sharing capability is often unobservable or hidden, and there have been mixed views on health consumers’ readiness for consumer-driven care. If health information sharing is seen as part of a daily habit of information sharing, it can be argued that health consumers may have developed unobserved information-sharing capability by managing and sharing broad information on a daily basis.

Objective:

The objective of this study is to explore an unobserved factor that influences health information sharing behavior. Given that finance information resembles health information in terms of dealing with private and sensitive personal information, we explicitly link and explore whether health consumers’ daily habit of financial information management affects health information sharing behavior under various circumstances, with respect to sharing contents, sharing occasions, and requesting stakeholders.

Methods:

Propensity score matching is utilized to estimate average treatment effect (ATE) as well as average treatment effect on the treated (ATET) of financial technology use (internet banking use) on the individuals’ willingness to share personal health information. Treatment effect is defined as whether health consumers use internet banking daily or not. We balanced the treatment and control samples using caliper matching based on observed covariates (gender, income, health status, and access to primary care provider), resulting in a minimal level of bias between unmatched and matched samples (bias < 5%).

Results:

We found that for sharing contents, those who use internet banking daily are more likely to share general information (p = .014), current information (p = .003), as well as entire data (p = .036). For sharing occasions, they are more willing to share their information in all cases (p = .022) as well as for a medical emergency (p-value = .086). Interestingly, for requesting stakeholders, these daily internet banking users are more prone to share their personal health data with stakeholders who are not directly involved in their care, such as physicians in the focal organization (p = .097) and health administrators (p = .048).

Conclusions:

Health consumers’ hidden daily behaviors in managing various sources of health and non-health information can help predict information-sharing capability. We demonstrated that daily financial information management can encourage health information sharing with much broader extent, instances, and stakeholders. We seek more attention to this unobserved daily habit driven by use of various non-health technologies, all of which can implicitly affect individuals’ ownership of personal health information, improving health outcomes by actively involving in the care processes.