Caregroup Case Study Summary

CareGroup

1. What is the problem? What were the underlying causes of this problem? In 1996, three major Massachusetts’s hospitals, The Beth Israel, the Deaconess, and the Mount Auburn Hospital merged to form the CareGroup. Their goal for the merger was to reduce costs and improve service to their hospital patients. One aspect of the merger was to consolidate the record keeping and data systems of the three hospitals into a single network. In November 2002, a CareGroup researcher started experimenting with a file sharing application on the new network. Before the researcher finished setting up the software, he received a call from his wife that she was in labor. He left the software running and the software began to explore surrounding

Another problem was that CareGroup had weak foundation for a powerful system; when the system linked all the hospitals together, the network was not designed to handle large amounts of data, causing the system to crash. In addition, CareGroup, in an effort to reduce costs, reduced the budget for IT and relied on a small, in-house IT team to consolidate the three networks into a single system. Consequently, there was only one expert responsible for the whole software application and the other staff didn’t know about

People can get sick, quit the organization, have bad attitudes, or have personal emergencies. CareGroup had only one person who was knowledgeable and familiar with the project, which makes a very weak system. A single person will have “blind spots” and will often be too busy making modifications to thoroughly document what was done and why. As a result, it took over four days to bring CareGroup’s system back on line and lots of hours of outside expertise to correct its problems. It is important to train other employee or have the expert share all his knowledge with the CareGroup team so that this kind of problem won’t happen again.

Lesson 3 –keep one’s working knowledge current: CareGroup network components were not up to date. They were still using an old, 1990s, model and it needed to be replaced to back up the network. It is important to have budget for the latest technology to stay out of date. It is also important to set funds for training so that CareGroup team could stay current on network maintenance. Keeping knowledge current helps increase productivity, an organization to stay organized and reduces operating