The Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association (VHHA) and the Northern Virginia Hospital Alliance (NVHA) along with COMCARE are engaged in two initiatives to promote interoperable emergency communications.

THE NEED

The efforts of this group arose out of the need for resources to aid Virginia hospitals in emergency management communication throughout the state.

COMCARE'S APPROACH

VHHA began this process by developing a website to be used as an information repository, database of contacts and hospital data, and an emergency management tool. VHHA also developed an integrated bed availability site which accepts feed from both the Compressus and EMSystem hospital diversion and bed tracking systems used in the state so that during an emergency a common operational view of the entire state is available for high level managers.

To promote interoperability in all of its hospitals, VHHA reviewed ESi’s WebEOC and purchased a license for use by all hospitals within the Commonwealth. Planned future enhancements will 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 organization in the state and across the region to follow suit.

The Virginia hospitals are also working to define a patient tracking system. VHHA’s Hospital Emergency Management Committee (HEMC) has collaborated with COMCARE to launch a pre-hospital patient tracking initiative. The initiative will explore the issue of patient tracking and seek to identify how patient tracking systems can be used to improve emergency response, increase the quality of patient care, lower healthcare costs and improve overall emergency preparedness.

FROM VISION TO REALITY

VHHA is planning to purchase an emergency alerting tool so that head officials can be notified via their mobile phone or pager when an event has occurred. In addition, a series of enhancements to VHHA’s WebEOC license will provide added functionality specific to the hospital setting.

A patient tracking working group has been assembled to create a guidebook and tool-kit for communities who are interested in developing patient tracking systems. The tool-kit will include case studies of previous deployments, model provider requirements, possible technical solutions for data exchange and collection, solutions for integration with other applications such as Electronic Health Records, a model development plan and a model RFP that can be adapted to meet the unique needs of individual communities. 

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