The Northern Virginia Hospital Alliance (NVHA) along with COMCARE is engaged in an initiative to promote interoperable emergency communications. These efforts will serve as resources to aid Virginia hospitals in emergency management communication throughout the state.

THE NEED

The process began almost two years ago when NVHA expressed interest in purchasing ESi’s WebEOC as its emergency management tool. To promote interoperability in all of its hospitals, VHHA reviewed the system and purchased a license for use by all hospitals within the Commonwealth. Planned future enhancements provide added capabilities and a new design that is tailored to the specific needs of hospitals. This process has been celebrated as a success and prompted numerous other agencies and organizations in the state and across the region to follow suit.

COMCARE'S APPROACH

Modeled after the E-Safety Network, the Northern Region’s new Information Management System uses the Emergency Provider Access Directory (EPAD) and EPAD Connect prototypes to send geographically targeted and incident-type based messages to any emergency response agency registered in the directory. A new message broker function allows external systems to build an interface to the Northern region’s network. This marks the first permanent trial deployment of EPAD and EPAD Connect and shows significant steps toward interoperable data communications between different agencies and jurisdictions in the National Capital area.

FROM REALITY TO VISION

COMCARE continues to support the use of interoperability tools in Virginia’s hospitals. EPAD Connect and the other tools for the Information Management System are currently being migrated to a new hosting environment to support NVHA’s use. To fully deploy the system to the hospitals a series of training courses must be conducted at the regional level and with the individual hospitals in order to familiarize users with the tools and the policies for their use.

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