sntise wrote on Monday, June 25, 2012:
Several weeks ago, I contacted Sam about the idea of having my team to do a organizational consulting-type of project with OpenEMR/OEMR. The following is a summary / introduction of the initial message I sent to Sam:
My name is Nelson. Currently, a couple of my fellow MBA students and I , with the help from a management science professor of ours, are looking into doing a study on behavior of online organizations over the summer by building a management consulting project as a case study around the organization itself.
I currently work as a software developer myself and I have always been interested to learn more about the development of open source EHRS in the US . I have previously written project paper as a course requirement on topics related to open source electronic medical record systems and how the meaningful usage certification requirement may affect usage of open source EHRS . Because of these reasons, I am interested to do the study on topics related to the development of OpenEMR.
Do you think it will be possible for the OpenEMR project to be studied by myself and a group of 3-4 MBA students? The effort going into this study will not need to be published, and it will only be used as a case study for discussion purposes for a MBA management course we are currently taking over the summer. This study will be more or less equivalent to a consulting service, yet it is done by MBA students from Rutgers for free–there is absolutely no money being charged.
The idea here is that we would like to gain access into the OpenEMR community in order to look at how well the different elements from within OpenEMR community fit together. By using various methods such as surveys, interviews, and other data collection processes, we want to study OpenEMR project as a organization from the perspective of various organizational behavior models. Through the process, we should be able to identify organizational problems, find the causes of those problems and offer recommendations of how to fix those problem to improve the OpenEMR community. As a result, the open source OpenEMR community can become better and more efficient when implementing/designing new features, assisting in trouble-shooting and writing new software components in the future. At the end of this
study, you and other from OpenEMR community will receive a consulting report compiled by our team of MBA students.
The type of organizational behavior models we will be using to study online organizations would includes well-known models such as the Nadler& Tushman’s Congruence Model:
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newSTR_95.htm
do you think it is possible at all to allow the OpenEMR developer community to be studied by us as part of our MBA student project? The project is not about proposing to add new features to OpenEMR. So currently we think posting to this thread in this OpenEMR forum may be the best for us to get in touch with the OpenEMR community about the idea.
I believe a business consulting case study, like the one my group of MBA students are going to work on, can has a positive impact on improving awareness of OpenEMR if it is known that OpenEMR is proven to be able to work effectively without much troublshooting problems and other overhead costs to the health clinics that are adopting OpenEMR. The consulting case study can be used as a tool to identify some of the existing organizational problems and to suggest possible solutions, this in turn will help to promote confidence in the use of OpenEMR among health clinics in the US.
Please let me know about your thoughts on this matter.
thanks,
-Nelson