Challenge
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), created the Emergency Care Coordination Center (ECCC) in April 2009 in response to Homeland Security Presidential Directive #21. The ECCC is primarily focused on addressing issues related to in-hospital emergency medical care, and is also tasked with advancing regional partnerships and promoting local, regional, and state emergency systems’ preparedness for and response to public health events.
As part of its mission, the ECCC envisioned a system to capture, organize, and display data being collected by hospital emergency departments throughout the country. The system would be capable of integrating and graphically displaying hospital data for trend identification and analysis and providing near real-time surveillance information to support emergency personnel.
Solution
The ECCC selected Atlas Research to develop the Emergency Department Situational and Tactical Awareness Tool (ED-STAT), a system designed to integrate near real-time information from a variety of emergency department information systems and display specified hospital administrative data to provide federal emergency planners and managers information on the stress and strain placed on specific emergency departments during major emergency events.
Result
Atlas designed a web-based system to collect data from five hospital emergency department information systems in the National Capitol Region. The ED-STAT features an aggregation of hospital and other emergency department situational data in an easy-to-understand interface, with data normalized and propagated to a user-friendly dashboard tailored to its primary audiences: emergency responders, health care providers, and emergency decision makers.
Atlas completed this project in August 2010 and created a system to assist ECCC in achieving its goal to improve the resiliency, efficiency, effectiveness, and capacity of daily hospital emergency care delivery as well as strengthen the state of readiness for public health emergencies and disasters.