Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

3. Cross-project analysis
Jose Teixeira and Reima Suomi
A quantitative summary of our research is presented within Table 4 . Surprisingly, no patients
provided negative feedback on any of the studied patient to patient open-source software
applications. MyShi software was not targeted in any of the observed communities, Pump download
collected minor feedback however GNU Gluco control software was considerably mentioned in the
communities. It is very important to retain that most of the feedback provided was extremely positive,
many commercial solutions were not so well recognized by patients within the observed online
communities.
Table 4: Observed patient to patient online communities (authors) and (http://sourceforge.net 2010)
Behaviour GNU Gluco Control MyShi Pumpdowloand
User download >10 000 548 342
User looks for use information 4 0 0
User express positive feedback 8 0 3
User express negative feedback 0 0 0
User reports a bug 1 0 0
User requests a new feature 5 0 1
User requests a competitor feature 1 0 0
It is extremely hard to figure out why GNU Gluco Control is more popular than the other studied
software. However, the researcher would like to point out that the lead developer of GNU Gluco
control was member in two of the observed communities. Moreover, he communicated several times
with another patients presenting by very simple manners its open-source project. The authors did not
notice any other marketing initiative conducted by members of the studied open-source software
projects.
After conducting this study, the authors perceived that those patients are satisfied with their hardware
devices such as pumps and meters, however they present very often criticism to the software
complementing the medical devices. Most of the negative feedback provided on traditional
commercial medical software were: Poor functionality of the software; absence of software that could
run in non-Microsoft operating systems such as Macintosh and Linux; lock-in mechanisms where one
device only work with a single correspondent software and vice-versa; lack of data export capabilities
that could allow patients to work their medical data in the common Microsoft excel spreadsheet
software; and finally many patients stated that some software was made by developers that do not
understand the patient chronic condition status quotidian implications. '
Surprisingly, and addressing the second research question, only once an user requested missing
features that are available in competitor products. This could suggest that, from the functional pointof-
view, the open-source solutions do not differer from the commercial solutions. They support the
same use-cases but implemented by different manners, however future research is needed by
systemically comparing the features provided by the studies open-source software and the existing
commercial products on the market.
4. Lessons learned and implications
The researchers, after the literature review process, were not able to find previous research literature
covering the exact phenomenon addressed by this research. Existing literature on patient-centric
healthcare information systems is widely available, but most of it ignores that few patients are taking
the lead in the creation of new healthcare information systems, by themselves, in the form of opensource
applications.
Even if the studied phenomenon seems to be a great example of user innovation, but it is widely
ignored by scholars on innovation related topics. The high end-user satisfaction observed on some of
the analysed patient-driven software applications suggests that, like in other areas, open-source
chronic care solutions are credible and often preferred by users over proprietary ones. However the
amount of collected data warns any generalization on how innovative and satisfying this patient-driven
software is for chronic patients.
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