Patient Acceptance of Health Cards and Health Insurance Information Systems

Abstract

On new health cards as well as in the underlying information system highly sensitive information can be stored. While different studies analysed the acceptance of physicians and hospitals, the patients’ side is somewhat neglected. Though, their personal rights are mostly affected. This paper investigates the acceptance of patients towards the new health card and IS that was recently introduced in Germany. For this, we conducted a survey among 183 patients and analysed the acceptance by structural equation modelling. The dependent variable has a coefficient of determination of 70% so that the model explains the acceptance of patients well. The results show that patients are still too badly informed about the health card. They highly fear a misuse of their data. The model suggests to better inform especially people of poor health about the benefits of the card and about the efforts that are made to protect the data.