With the 2010 Hurricane Season upon us, the VA Medical Center in West Palm Beach is rolling out two new initiatives that will significantly enhance each of the traditional four phases of emergency management – Preparedness, Mitigation, Response and Recovery. These new initiatives are the integration of two electronic notification systems and two Internet-Based Healthcare Incident Command Systems. These new programs are “on-line” and ready for use by staff who may be assigned duties at the medical center during a storm event and/or by those who may be out of Palm Beach County.
Throughout the United States, the healthcare industry has recognized that communication is essential to effectively manage all aspects of any type of disaster from internal situations to external calamities. With the new electronic notification systems, the medical center can communicate effortlessly to activate specific key staff and response teams of doctors, nurses, medical technicians, and support staff to prepare for, and respond to, critical incidents that may have the potential to adversely affect Veteran healthcare, patient and staff safety, and the security of the facility. The electronic notification systems are state of the art, Internet-Based systems that are pre-loaded with key staff telephone (office, home, and cell phone) and pager numbers along with multiple email addresses that supports communication via voice and text. The systems also operate via SMS, MMS, VOIP and BlackBerry® smart phones thus ensuring seamless continuity of operations during any type of situation.
The Joint Commission has fashioned emergency management performance guidelines into a set of standards that include effective emergency communications. These standards embrace requirements for back-up communications processes. With these electronic notification systems, the medical center adds another tool which enhances compliance to the standards by allowing for communications with staff through any electronic device that receives voice or text notification along with supporting requirements for communication with external authorities, patients and their families and critical hospital suppliers. As an added bonus, the system can deliver and track all communication for compliance purposes and after action reporting.
Emergency Management, like all disciplines, depends a great deal on communications and sharing of information in a timely manner. Due to increasing demands for information at all levels of government, and especially in the Veterans Health Administration, managing and sharing this information has become even more paramount. All elements of the VA, from the smallest Community Based Outpatient Clinic (CBOC) to our highly complex affiliated medical centers, are required to report, provide briefs, and update even the smallest incidents that can affect patient care. The VA has extensive IT applications but none that are geared specifically towards health care emergency management. To resolve this issue, two Web-Based incident management systems have been integrated into the Medical Center’s Hospital Incident Command Center (HICC). The Medical Center is now linked with the Palm Beach County Division of Emergency Management’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) through a system known as Web EOC. This system is a major emergency management tool for county EOCs around the state. Each hospital in Palm Beach County has access to Web EOC through the county and it is the main tool for hospitals to report status and make any requests to the county and vice versa.
The second Web-Based system is an emergency management software system for mostly hospital internal use within the HICC; it is also linked up with the county and regional (Region 7) EOCs who can view special reports concerning community/region hospital status. It is not, however, designed to fully interact with organizations outside of an individual hospital. The VA Medical Center will use this system for internal tasks, assignments and documentation for After Action Reports.
Future initiatives that the Medical Center will be exploring are the use of Social Media in preparing, planning and response activities and a renovation of both the VAMC West Palm Beach’s Internet and Intranet Emergency Management web sites. These newly popular online programs have evolved over the past few years into a new form for communications – that of updating, tweeting, posting, and short videos. The fast pace of information exchange has become attractive to veterans of all ages and has become a phenomenon that is rapidly transforming the nature of communications in our society. Social Media is the future of communication for the purpose of emergency notification.
