Sidebar

UPMC's Online Command Center

At an organization like the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) - which includes 20 hospitals and 400 outpatient sites and physician offices - communicating during an emergency situation can get tricky. With this in mind, the organization created PrepLink, a Web site designed to help hospital and emergency responders and public health officials plan for, respond to and recover from disasters.

The site was utilized during the recent H1N1 outbreak to coordinate information for the health system, the region and the state, according to Bill Smith, director of environmental safety and health at UPMC. “What happens most frequently in emergency situations is people don't know the status at any given moment. There's an information lag. The other issue is there are multiple sources of information out there, and they have different systems and different silos,” says Smith. “PrepLink.org was established to synthesize that information and give people a place they can go to for accurate information.”

The site includes public information, such as links to the CDC and status on hospital closings, as well as a secure side for providers. During the various stages of H1N1, staff from UPMC and both the Allegheny County and Pennsylvania state health departments leveraged the secure site to communicate, share documents, and provide situational awareness updates, he says.

“We posted documents in a workspace where everyone with a secure log-in could comment or review to make sure we had the most updated version, as opposed to e-mailing it out to everyone, where you have 30 versions floating around and you don't know which is the most updated,” says Smith. “We eliminated that problem with this tool, where we can have our expert team review a document and we can have it to the physicians very quickly.” - K.G.

Sidebar

Disease Reporting Simplified

The speed that news about the H1N1 virus - some of which was inaccurate - circulated among media outlets underscores a hospital's critical role in reporting infectious disease data, according to Marcia Patrick, R.N., director of infection prevention and control at the four-hospital MultiCare Health System (Tacoma, Wash.). And not just reporting information, but transmitting it in a way that is efficient and facilitates analysis by organizations like the CDC, says Patrick, who is also a board member for the Washington-based Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (APIC).

Currently, more than 30 states have mandatory reporting requirements for healthcare-associated infections, with the laws varying in terms of timeframes, says Patrick (H1N1 falls into a 24-hour window). “Overall, the laws are very similar. Generally, reporting is done through the county and state health departments,” many of which have adopted the standardized definitions and surveillance methods specified by CDC's National Healthcare Safety Network, she says.

The methods used to report data, however, tend to differ significantly. For example, at Massachusetts General Hospital, infectious disease data is sent electronically to the state health department using the Ensemble platform from Cambridge, Mass.-based InterSystems, according to CIO Jim Noga. KishHealth System in DeKalb, Ill., also transmits information electronically. But for a large number of practices and hospitals, data is still faxed or even mailed.

That, says Patrick, is where the problem lies, as many organizations still use processes that are complex and labor-intensive, and subsequently, don't allow for data to easily be shared. “Having to collect different pieces of data and different denominators is crazy,” says Patrick. “So one of the things we're working on is to try to get that standardized. It's important, because if all organizations don't do it the same way, we can't compare data.” - K.G.

Sidebar

Disease Reporting Organizations

• World Health Organization (http://www.who.int/en)

• CDC Public Health Information Network (http://www.cdc.gov/PHIN/)

• CDC National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (http://www.cdc.gov/NEDSS)

• Public Health Data Standards Consortium (http://www.phdsc.org)

• Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology (http://www.apic.org)

Sidebar

Takeaways

• It is critical that hospitals and health systems can quickly activate plans to increase bed capacity and stage screening areas in the event of a disease outbreak.

• Another piece of a hospital's emergency plan should include posting information on the homepage for patients.