Dear OpenHealth-List participants: We are conducting a research on Open Source software adoption in health care and we would like to introduce ourselves to the list. Here is our brief letter of introduction regarding our proposed research followed by information about ourselves and our contact information. We welcome anyone who would like to participate in this research project.
This ongoing research intends to examine the adoption issues concerning open source solutions in Healthcare field. Open Source Software often refers to "software whose source code is openly published", is usually available at no charge, and which is often developed by voluntary efforts." The potential benefits of adopting open source solution within health care domain has been widely discussed among the health care professionals as well as researchers. According to Wright G and Murray P. (2002), these include: * User driven application development * Flexible development processes that respond and react to changing requirements * Reuse of components, collaborative development and resource sharing * Minimization of license fees, allowing users to better deploy their budgets * Freedom of having the software not being controlled by any single organization, enterprise, or vested interests * Facilitated peer review and better quality assurance However, the current adoption rate of open source software within health care field remains low. Mailing list discussions among health care professionals point out that the lack of vendor support; management resistance, security and privacy concerns could potentially hinder the open source adoption. To investigate the factors that potentially drive or impede open source adoption, and to evaluate the attained benefits after the adoption of open source software, we propose research that examines a particular open source software VistA in detail. We have chosen this because it has been widely used in VA hospitals. However, we are open to other OS health care implementations as well. To begin our initial research in this area, we plan to conduct either telephone interviews or face-to-face interviews with experts who have adopted or used VistA or other open source platforms. So please contact us if you have any experience with adoption and usage of Open Source Software in the health care field. After the data is collected, we are going to use ATLAS-ti content analysis software - to analyze the data. The results will be presented in a research paper. Your participation and support would be highly appreciated. We may be contacted at: Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 415-338-6286 About the researchers: Leigh Jin, Ph.D. - Assistant professor of Information Systems, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA Research Interests: Virtual Community, Open Source solution in Health Care, and Open Source software development model. Lorie Obal - Graduate student in the Information Science Ph.D. program, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. Research Interests: Open Source software development and adoption. Disruptive technologies and organizational behavior Thank you in advance for your support :-) Sincerely, Leigh and Lorie
