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Caregroup Case Study Summary

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Tram Duong Case 1: CareGroup Background After five major hospitals in Massachusetts merged together in 1996, CareGroup became the second largest collection of hospitals in its region. As the hospitals needed to increase their contracting power against health maintenance organizations, improve the quality of care while simultaneously decreasing costs and remain profitable in a complex price war, merging was their best option to remain successful and to provide the best treatment for patients. However, the hospitals initially experienced revenue loss over seven years as the group’s operations were decentralized and unstandardized. To remedy the issue, a new, cutting edge information technology system was developed successfully in 2002 and implemented. …show more content…

Due to mergers, the network became out of spec. These types of factors should be monitored so the network can adapt before problems occur. Lesson #7: There are limits to customer-centric responsiveness. Customer requests cannot be given total control over the network, but should be judged to determine their impact before being implemented. This way no area becomes too much of a burden. Lesson #8: Have backup procedures in which you can have confidence. Due to their preparedness for Y2K, CareGroup could continue operations despite slowing down, which is something to emulate with hopefully more robust contingency and recovery plans in the future. Lesson #9: Component redundancy is not enough; you need alternative access methods. As CareGroup’s access methods failed, additional methods could have limited the extent of the outage. Alternative access methods should be built into a system to prevent additional downtime that can be prevented in some way. Lesson #10: Life-cycle-manage your network components. As the rate of technological improvements increase, network components should be used for their life cycle before switching them out. As shown with CareGroup’s major problem with an outdated component, old parts can hinder a network and should be replaced according to a schedule with an adequate budget to diminish negative

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