A Privacy Perspective in Adopting Smart Contract Applications for Healthcare

Abstract

Smart contract applications are currently implemented in healthcare, but further research is needed to investigate their adoption by embracing a privacy perspective. This study fills this research gap by exploring smart contracts’ adoption in healthcare through a privacy calculus model integrated with technical, legal, and social factors. The authors explore two specific applications: smart contracts implementing immune certificates (SC-ICs) to fight a healthcare crisis and smart contracts encoding and storing electronic health records (SC-EHRs) in the absence of such a crisis. Data are collected through a survey, and partial least square modeling is used to test the research hypotheses. The results provide significant contributions for academics and practitioners by showing how the influence of technical, legal, and social factors on privacy evaluations and privacy calculus evaluations themselves differ in the case of different applications of the same technology, i.e. SC-ICs and SC-EHRs because of the peculiar healthcare scenario.