UC Davis Conducting Research Survey on What Motivates Open Health Developers

Mona Alsaffar, a health informatics graduate student at University of California-Davis is conducting a study about developers involved in healthcare open source projects. She contacted Open Health News for help in informing the open health community about the project.

Alsaffar is seeking for open source developers to take a 20 question anonymous survey. The survey should take approximately 5 minutes. It will provide her with valuable information for her research project. According to Alsaffar, "I believe this research is an important work to characterize healthcare F/OSS globally."

This is a unique project and we don't know of anyone that has done this. According to Alsaffar, "hundreds of open source projects are available now and the certification of open source EMR under the meaningful use provides a value to open source options and allow the users to be eligible for federal incentive dollars."

She points out that "many research papers have discussed open source movement in healthcare," however, "none of them has studied the motivation, knowledge, background and characteristics of developers involved in open source electronic health record."

The survery can be found at: <http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/1636553/Open-Source-Electronic-Medical-record-software-survey>.

For those who would like more details on the project, Alsaffar can be contacted via email.