Consumers’ Security Concerns: Does it Exist in the Context of Adopting RFID in the Healthcare Industry?

This study seeks to investigate consumers’ concerns with personal privacy, and security threats to personal information (Ohkubo et al 2005; Smith 2005). The context is potential consumers’ behavioral intention to adopt the RFID technology in the healthcare arena, and the research question explored is: Do patients have privacy concerns resulting from the application of RFID based tracking in the healthcare arena? While existing literature talks about consumer privacy issues in general as being incumbent upon the deployment of technology (Hossain and Prybutok 2008), or of adoption of RFID by the healthcare industry (Lee and Shim 2007), no research has been done specifically concerning the privacy of patients in the healthcare arena.