Six Best Practices for Your Health System's Disaster Readiness Plan

TeleTracking’s Disaster Readiness Program 

Preparing healthcare systems for disasters is essential to achieve a state of readiness and resilience. TeleTracking recognizes the importance of disaster readiness through streamlined workflows enabled by technology, and real-time data to provide continuous shared awareness for managing a critical event and has developed a Disaster Readiness Program to support hospitals and health systems.

Hospitals and health systems can incorporate additional measures and best practices into their disaster preparedness plan. A good checklist includes the following: 

1. Review your processes for obtaining the origin, status, and medical history of patients admitted and transferred during an emergency or disaster setting. Make use of technologies available that will allow you to flag and track patients as they move to and from facilities.  
2. Work in advance with other health systems to determine how many patients can be handled safely and establish mutual aid agreements. Integrate those agreements within your hospital disaster plans.  
3. Identify a back-up location and/or virtual operation for your hospital command center prior to a disaster event. 
    
4. Create a system to effectively track special needs and mental health patients.  
5. Prepare for the possibility of having enough beds but not enough staff.  
6. Plan for power outages and regulatory requests and print hard copies of key information in advance. Appoint a Transfer Center clinician as an active, key member of your Health System Command Center Response Team.