Care Group Case Study Solution
Describe the case context (the company, the industry, major competitors, and some data on the firm, if applicable)
Five hospitals in Massachusetts had experienced mergers in the year 1996 and this had resulted in the creation of the Care Group. The forces within the industry that had pressurized for this move of the five hospitals included the excessive and intense competition along with the financial pressures faced by the hospitals in the healthcare industry. The purpose of the merger was to tie down the multiple legacy systems that were used in these medical facilities.
The merger was proved to be highly beneficial for all the doctors because of their day to day operations and the single point for accessing all the necessary information. The Care Group healthcare system encompassed five total hospitals that had created a massive data integration system for meeting the crucial needs for data access and integration. Halamaka became the CEO of the group on November 1, 1998 and at that time the hospital had staff members of around 380 and the annual expenditures of the hospital group were in excess of $ 50 million.
The IT system that was developed for the group had created a IT network for integrating the numerous departments of each facility. By the end of the year 2002, all the hospitals were brought on a similar ground and they all shares the same common system of the most advanced network and IT systems that were present at that time in US. The merger had proved to be highly successful and it was the second largest group of the hospitals in the US with revenues exceeding $ 1.6 billion.
The integrated technology system was the one factor that kept the group on the same grounds and it had also reduced the ill impacts of decentralization and all the non-standardized operations of the company. The capital budget of the group had also been reduced significantly since 2002. The dependence for the IT structure within the healthcare industry has increased over the time and the management of Care Group had taken full advantage of the IT systems and their dependence on the IT had increased.
Question 2
The issues raised by the case: what is the problem (threat) or opportunity presented by case?
The complete IT network of 5 Massachus sets hospitals had went down in the year 2002 and this had collapsed the entire system for around 4 days. This problem began when one of the researcher in the Care Group was experimenting with some kind of file sharing application in 2002 and when the researcher found that his wife was in labor, he left the software in an untested state and the software was running. All the surrounding networks were being explored by this application and large volumes of the data had been copied by the software and the data that was being moved across those networks was in terabytes.
As a result of this, the network for Care Group had collapsed for around 4 days on November 13, 2002. The cause of the problem was not being identified by anyone within the IT department and finally the Cisco field experts found the problem with the help of their IT Swat Team. This was a serious threat to the network security of the group and although it was an unintentional breach of the network failure, aggressive steps need to be taken by the institutions to deal with this security threat. The cause of this threat could be said to be the cyber-attack of a disgruntled employees of the group who had compromised the system therefore, a robust protocol for security needs to be in place for dealing with the security risk assessment....................
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