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

and Chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange, John D Halamka, MD, MS was not the root cause on the events that took place on November 13, 2002. In fact he is reported as stating in his Life as a CIO Blog: The CareGroup Network Outage (2008), “it was not the infrastructure under investments that was the root cause of the events that took place on November 13, 2002, it was his lack of enterprise network infrastructure knowledge (Halamka, 2008).”
The Collapse of the CareGroup Network
On November 13, 2002 at 1:45 PM, the network traffic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center came to a complete halt. Healthcare professionals at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center had no electronic access to patients’ medical history or the ability to electronically order medications or labs. The healthcare professionals found themselves at the mercy of relying on an antiquated-paper back-up system.
There multiple causes for the three- and a-half day collapse of the CareGroup network; spanning from operational inefficiencies to the lack of enterprise network infrastructure knowledge.
However, the initial event that began the catastrophe involved the actions of a single researcher. It is important to note that the organization’s information systems basic structure was designed with multiple operating systems integrated into a single network. The researcher installed an unauthorized experimental software program and unintentionally breached the network. The untested software he installed was designed to locate and copy information across the network automatically. Unfortunately, no sooner than he set up the software, he was notified that his wife had gone into labor, abruptly left for his three-week paternity leave; but, he left the new software running.
The rogue software began exploring the network, seeking out and copying data, in larger and larger volumes and ultimately continuing this redundant process from other computers.

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

working.
The Impact of the Collapsed Network
At 1:45 PM on November 13, 2002, the network traffic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center came to a complete halt. Healthcare professional at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center had no electronic access to patients’ medical history or the ability to neither electronically order medications nor order labs. The healthcare professional found themselves at the mercy of relying on an antiquated paper-based back-up system. The back-up system was created in the year 2000; however, it was missing critical components.
With the network down, all digitized and computer tools were no longer available, meaning when a physicians wrote a prescription, they had to physically check for drug interactions. Radiology residents who had never touched an actual x-ray photographic film had to learn the primitive method of diagnosing. The main source of communication reverted from emails to telephones, as Halamka explained, “the CareGroup information systems went from the 21st century back to the 1970’s in an instant (Halamka 2008).”
Recommendation
An examination of CareGroup’s internal strengths and weaknesses, its opportunities for growth and improvement and the threats the external environment presents to it survival has been completed. As the result of the comprehensive analysis the following recommendation is suggested to The Board of Directors of CareGroup as a strategic alternative to eliminate another opportunity for a network outage. The comprehensive analysis results are presented in Table 1.