Formation Of Caregroup Case Study

The Formation of CareGroup
The CareGroup organization was formed on October 1, 1996 as a result of financial pressures and excessive competition that occurring in Eastern Massachusetts within the healthcare industry. The merger of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Boston Deaconess Hospitals, which created the CareGroup organization, positioned the organization as the second largest group of hospitals in Eastern Massachusetts. CareGroup was comprised of 13,000 healthcare employees and 2000 medical staff, all who were dedicated to provide its patients with the best quality care and offering a broad spectrum of health services.
The organization continued to grow through mergers and acquisitions, and soon realized there was a need for data integration and access among its growing network. Unfortunately, by the year 2002, CareGroup was a $2 billion enterprise, but as a result of its operating losses only had a network budget of $50,000. This limited resource hindered the organization’s ability to invest in its information system’s infrastructure and although was vital to the information health of the organization, according to Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Medical Center

Meanwhile, these massive files quickly began monopolizing the services of the central location network switch. Since the network was physically redundant throughout, the network components tried to calculate new paths along which the data could flow; but eventually became confused. Therefore, the redundant components intended to operate in tandem became primary and began to duplicate each other’s functions, resulting in an endless loop until the network was totally disabled. On the afternoon of November 13, 2002, every software application that required network communication abruptly stopped