SECTION A Answer ALL the questions in this section. Question 1 NOTE: All 4 questions are related to the case study. Overview Community Medical Associates (CMA) is a large urban health care system with two hospitals, 25 satellite health centers, and outpatient clinics. CMA had 1.5 million outpatient visits and 60,000 inpatient admissions the previous year. Long patient wa times, uncoordinated clinical and patient information, and medical errors plagued the system. Doctors, nurses, lab technici: managers, and medical students in training were very aggravated with the labyrinth of forms, databases, and communication lir Accounting and billing were in a situation of constant confusion and correcting medical bills and insurance payments. complexity of the CMA information and communication system overwhelmed its people. Today, CMA uses an integrated operating system that consolidates over 50 CMA databases into one. Health care providers in the CMA system now have access to these records through 7,000 computer terminals. The next phase in the development of CMAs integrated system was to connect it to suppliers, outside labs and pharmacies, other hospitals, and to doctor's home computers, that is, the entire value chain. The case allows the students to apply lean principles to a large and complex health care network and think about the nature of the value chain. This case is best assigned to individual students or student teams and the class discussion can range from 20 to 30 minutes depending on what the instructor wants to emphasize. Like many cases in the OM text, we try to get students out of the goods-producing factory and into a service- providing organization. Question 2 Using information from the case, sketch the original paper-based value chain and compare it to a sketch of the modern electronic value chain that uses a common database. Examine how the performance of both systems might compare.