Emergency Response and Public Health: Defining Common Business Processes and Information System Requirements Critical to Effectively Detect, Assess, and Respond to a Biological Incident

Local health departments are encouraged to organize their emergency preparedness and response activities around Incident Command System (ICS) principles.  Information systems that meet incident-specific needs are critical resources for efficient public health emergency response.  However, ICS and other emergency preparedness guides do not describe a common understanding of what public health information systems must do to support an effective public health emergency response.  Although local health departments do essentially the same work and function in many similar ways, available information systems do not adequately meet the need for efficient response to an emergency.  To overcome this hurdle, business processes and task flows necessary for responding to an emergency must be defined.  Defining relevant business processes and task flows will guide definition of information systems requirements.  In this study, we employ a Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII) collaborative requirements development methodology to define business processes, task flows, and information system requirements that support a local health department’s ICS-based response to a biological incident.  This methodology specifies three phases: business process analysis, business process redesign, and information systems requirements definition.

In this poster we present results of the business process analysis phase.  Identification and prioritization of business processes were conducted with extensive consultation with emergency response personnel, resulting in nine identified business processes that are common to local public health departments and critical to a biological incident response: conduct syndromic surveillance, conduct disease investigation, assess the situation, develop an incident action plan, identify and manage personnel, assemble and manage volunteers, assemble and manage supplies and equipment, provide mass prophylaxis, and conduct risk communication activities.  We also present diagrams depicting anticipated information flow between business processes, detailed descriptions of each process under analysis, and a sample task flow.