Greenway Medical Technologies: Challenging the Goliaths in Electronic Medical Records

This case examines the business development and strategic expansion of Greenway Medical Technologies, a software company delivering electronic healthcare solutions to physicians operating small practices. Over a period of seven years and with an investment of $70 million, Greenway built a best-in-class software application. The case also describes the electronic medical record systems industry and the key drivers impacting the growth of this industry and healthcare delivery in the United States

Greenway Medical Technologies: The Pace-Setting David of Electronic Health Records

This teaching case updates a previous study of Greenway Medical Technologies, a software company delivering electronic healthcare record (EHR) solutions to physicians. The current EHR marketplace is considered, including global trends as well as the impact of U.S. government funded monetary incentives. Greenway continues to build on its best-in-class software application and find ways to provide new enticements to medical practices and improvements to the broader medical community. The case also describes the EHR systems industry and explores the reasons for Greenway’s continued success and growth that surpasses its competitors

Energy Informatics and Business Model Generation

Sustainability needs to be tightly woven into the thinking of every senior executive if we are to develop a sustainable society. Furthermore, those companies seek to gain from meeting the needs of such a society need to forefront sustainability in all of their planning and product development. With this in mind, we have taken the business model generation canvas and developed a layer to stimulate Energy Informatics thinking. Business model generation is a technique to capture the essential features of an organization\u27s business. It addresses such issues as value proposition, sources of costs and revenues, partnerships, and customers in a concise and graphical manner. Osterwalder and Pigneur\u27s book has quickly become an international best seller because the technique is powerful and collectively engaging. We have taken the business model generation canvas and created a group collaborative version on Cacoo, which is web-based software for creating diagrams collaboratively. One of the features of Cacoo is the ability to create layers, so we have augmented our initial two-layer model of a blank canvas and key questions, with a layer containing questions to provoke Energy Informatics thinking and a layer containing examples of the application of Energy Informatics. Our goal is to use the workshop to discuss the content of each of these layers. Specifically, we would like participants to address the following questions: Do we have good questions for each segment of the canvas? Should there be several canvases for different audiences? What are some good Energy Informatics examples to stimulate thinking? The resulting canvas will be made publicly available to advance the development of Green IS

Crowdfunding as Donations to Entrepreneurial Firms

The bulk of today's (“preorder-,” “reward-,” “gift-,” and “donation-based”) crowdfunding raises funds for small, private entrepreneurial ventures without granting funders private claims to the projects’ income or the ability to guarantee the realization and delivery of project outcomes. We theorize and show empirically – via a mixed-method approach applied to a representative and remarkably informative case – that the payoff structure for crowdfunders, akin to a public good contribution problem, leads to the tangible value of main project outputs exerting little influence on contributions to crowdfunding. This then raises the question of which funder motivations fund seekers may have to address to crowdfund their projects. We demonstrate the especially large role of non-pecuniary motivations and pinpoint three particular motivations that profit-seeking entrepreneurs may stimulate to be financed through crowdfunding. The findings hold important implications for entrepreneurs’ crowdfunding strategies, platform design, and our understanding of how this funding institution works in general. The study also adds to emerging research on the implications of the public good nature of crowdfunding

Studying the Role of Human Nature in Technology Acceptance

Humans are complex, evolved, social and cognitive beings. Thus, understanding their behavior is a complex task that requires a comprehensive theoretical repertoire. In this paper, we study the role of human nature in technology acceptance. We come to understand that by expanding our theoretical ontology and blending theories of evolutionary psychology, social, and cognitive psychology into a single frame, we gain a more comprehensive view that helps to better explain what drives humans to form reactions toward technology and to exhibit various usage behaviors. We situate the study in four different hospital settings using a case study method. By examining acceptance of mobile information technology (MICT) amongst nurses, we find that human nature in form of four drives has a bearing on technology acceptance and use in a manner that has not been adequately addressed in traditional IS literature

Opening the Classroom

We argue that information systems educators-and others in similarly dynamic professional disciplines-could benefit from an alternative infrastructure for learning. We present an open classroom model of education which expands upon Ferris\u27 (2002) collaborative partnership model of education by integrating open technologies such as Wiki and Open Source Software to create enduring knowledge products that more completely engage the students and provide value to society. We further view this concept through the lens of a social-technical system to demonstrate how such a system represents significant, third order change to traditional classroom environments. We illustrate our model with two successful cases from our personal teaching experiences

A Knowledge-centric Examination of Signaling and Screening Activities in the Negotiation for Information Systems Consulting Services

In many professional exchanges, information asymmetry is bilateral, which means that both parties hold information that the other party lacks and, as a result, both parties have the means to be opportunistic. To counter this asymmetry, both parties signal and screen information as they negotiate a consulting engagement. In this paper, we report on how a professional service provider and recipient typically use signaling and screening. The findings highlight that both parties signal and screen and withhold information and that the extent of project knowledge (tacit or explicit) affects how they do so. Tacit knowledge-centric projects have more signaling and screening events than explicit knowledge-centric projects but many of these signals actually increase the amount of information asymmetry

Organizational Adoption of Green IS & IT: An Institutional Perspective

This article examines how institutional pressures affect the adoption of green IS&IT across organizations. From the natural-resource-based perspective, it examines green IS&IT practices with strategic foci on pollution prevention, product stewardship, and sustainable development. Each category incorporates the separate roles played by IT (as a problem) and IS (as a solution). The partial least square method was employed to analyze the survey replies from 75 organizations. The results show that mimetic and coercive pressures significantly drive green IS&IT adoption. In particular, outcome-based imitation and imposition-based coercion represent major institutional processes. The results also suggest the complementary relationship between mimetic and coercive pressures. Such interaction significantly motivates the green IS&IT adoption focusing on product stewardship. These findings contribute to existing knowledge on the proenvironmental behaviors of organizations, demonstrate the interaction between institutional forces, and further current understanding of green IS&IT adoption. The study concludes with implications for research and practice

The nonlocal model of porewater irrigation: Limits to its equivalence with a cylinder diffusion model

Burrows maintained by animals in aquatic sediments ventilate the sediment and can substantially alter the rates and pathways of biologically-mediated decomposition reactions. A well known and effective way of modeling the impact of such bioirrigation in sediment diagenetic models is to assume that solutes diffuse into an annulus of sediment surrounding the burrow; the reaction diffusion equations are represented in cylindrical polar co-ordinates. More commonly, bioirrigation of sediments is represented by one-dimensional nonlocal irrigation models. Their use is typically justified by the assertion that a nonlocal model is equivalent to a radially-integrated two-dimensional diffusion model in cylindrical-polar co-ordinates. In this paper we highlight limits to this equivalence, drawing on examples from both single-species and multiple-species reaction diffusion models. A modified derivation of the nonlocal model using a higher order Taylor series approximation was tested but found to provide little improvement over the original model. We suggest some approaches for choosing nonlocal coefficients and identify particular limitations to be alert to when applying the nonlocal model