Managing Personnel During Public Health Response using PWMS

A chronic problem for public health emergency response management has been the inability to efficiently identify, assign, and track personnel involved in the response. Determining the location, roles, and status of response participants is often a resource draining task that produces less-than-accurate results. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has built a solution to provide these abilities, the Preparedness Workforce Management System (PWMS).  PWMS is currently used by the CDC Director’s Emergency Operations Center (DEOC) to manage response efforts and prepare for future public health events.

The web-based application provides the ability to:

·  Manage deployments (personnel sent in response to a public health emergency/event)

·  Manage teams (assignment to internal teams for event response needs)

·  Locate personnel (identify personnel based on travel, assignment, and work locations or geographical area)

·  Identify personnel (identify personnel based on knowledge, skills, and abilities)

·  Notify personnel (send telephonic and/or text alerts to personnel  by team or individual)

The comprehensive view of response efforts enables users to proactively address the issues of multiple deployment rosters, over-allocation of resources, and duplication of coordination efforts.  The result is better accountability of personnel resources and streamlined operations.

In recognition that several of the Public Health organizations with which the CDC interacts do not have an emergency responder management application and/or rely upon commercial or in-house solutions, the CDC is working to provide a stand-alone version of the PWMS application.  The intent is to enhance public health response abilities while alleviating the significant time and licensing costs incurred by individual organizations. 

To leverage collaborative benefits, an open source environment is planned for the PWMS application.  This approach will provide a platform for functional and procedural contributions while fostering relationships between public health IT.