Medical Surge Capacity Workshop Summary (2010) / Chapter Skim
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Appendix F: Creating Situational Awareness: A Systems Approach
Appendix F: Creating Situational Awareness: A Systems Approach
Pages 123-132
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Senior Associate Center for Biosecurity, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center WHAT IS SITUATIONAL AWARENESS? Put simply, situational awareness means understanding what is going on around you.
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The concept has been applied to the analysis of patient safety and healthcare quality issues.3 However, the most frequent use of the term in health care relates to emergency management and is often used in reference to computer systems to aggregate data in an emergency operations center, or to collect and transmit disease surveillance data. These systems are useful tools, and may even be essential tools, but they do not in and of themselves provide situational awareness.
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10 • Traditional public health disease surveillance, case investigation, and contact tracing • Laboratory reporting systems News and Web Trawling • ProMED (distributes disease reports submitted from around the world) • Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN)
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in the Department of Homeland Security.17 Another center, the National Biosurveillance Integration System (NBIS) created to connect various surveillance streams and agencies.18 Although these surveillance efforts undoubtedly provide information flows that did not exist before, it is not clear to what extent they have enabled a more robust understanding of a rapidly unfolding event.
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One thing that we certainly learned from this outbreak is that situational awareness is critically important -- it drives policy decisions. Decisions regarding school closings, personal protective equipment guidance, and antiviral use are all dependent on knowing key characteristics of the epidemic in real-time.
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Reportedly, BioSense data corroborated the ILInet data, but whether the data provided further useful information is not yet clear. One unexpected finding is that apparently a large outbreak of clinically mild disease can fly under the surveillance radar because most surveillance systems are designed to look for people sick enough to seek medical care.
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This can be accomplished by expand ing or enhancing existing influenza surveillance systems and by using existing tools like Survey Monkey to do very quick cohort studies. • Accessing information on hospitalized patients.
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The federal and state governments should harness the momentum toward universal health information technology to improve digital linkages between public health and hospitals so as to improve public health access to key clinical data. The federal government should invest in increasing the surge capacity of clinical and public health laboratories and in the development and dissemination of rapid diagnostic tests.
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2009. Flu Activity and Surveillance: Reports and Surveillance Methods in the United States webpage.
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St. Francis Prep Update: Swine flu outbreak.
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