Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jul 10, 2023
Date Accepted: Jan 25, 2024
A systematic review of patients’ perspectives on data confidentiality, privacy, and security of mobile health applications
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mobile Health Applications (mHealth apps) have the potential to enhance healthcare service delivery. However, concerns regarding patients' confidentiality, privacy, and security consistently affect the adoption of mHealth apps. Despite this, no review has comprehensively summarized the findings from studies on this subject matter.
Objective:
This systematic review aimed to investigate patients’ perspectives and awareness of the confidentiality, privacy, and security of the data collected through mHealth apps.
Methods:
Utilizing the PRISMA guideline, a comprehensive literature search was performed in three electronic databases: PubMed, Ovid, and ScienceDirect. All the retrieved articles were screened according to specific inclusion criteria to select relevant articles published between 2014 and 2022.
Results:
A total of 33 articles exploring mHealth patients’ perspectives and awareness of data privacy, security, and confidentiality issues and the associated factors were included in the systematic review. Thematic analyses of the retrieved data led to the synthesis of four themes: concerns about data privacy, confidentiality and security (2) awareness, (3) facilitators and enablers, and (4) associated factors. Patients demonstrated discordant and concordant perspectives regarding data privacy, security and confidentiality, as well as approaches to improve the use of mHealth apps (facilitators) such as protection of personal data, ensuring health status or medical condition are not mentioned, brief training or education on data security, and assuring data confidentiality and privacy. Likewise, awareness of the subject matter differed across studies, suggesting the need to improve patients’ awareness of data security and privacy. Patients’ concerns on the subject matter were influenced by sociodemographic characteristics such as age, income level, marital status, experience with mHealth apps, satisfaction levels, data type and data stage.
Conclusions:
Patients expressed diverse views on mHealth apps’ privacy, security and confidentiality, with some issues raised affecting the technology utilisation. The present findings may assist mHealth app developers and other stakeholders in improving patients’ awareness and adjusting current privacy and security features in mHealth apps to enhance their adoption and utilisation.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.