Collaboration during public health emergencies leveraging Microsoft SharePoint

The CDC Director’s Emergency Operations Center (DEOC) manages information associated with public health emergency incidents and inquiries. This information must be processed with the purpose of ensuring situational awareness within the DEOC while sharing information with external support that includes CDC Centers, external agencies, and other organizations. Because of the potential impact of these emergencies, the speed and efficiency of the DEOC’s ability to collect, analyze, and distribute information is crucial to the accurate and timely response of the CDC. Because of its diverse and sometimes disparate user group and the quantity of information processed, CDC emergency response personnel experience the following problems: inability to manage information in real-time, inability to easily find information, inability to share information and knowledge, duplication of data entry efforts, and the inability to automate current manual processes. The CDC has established a pilot project referred to as the DEOC Common Operating Picture (COP) to eliminate these pitfalls.

 

The purpose of the DEOC COP is to provide the CDC with a portal to efficiently administer information associated with the response to public health emergencies. The CDC is utilizing Microsoft Sharepoint as the foundation of the COP. Sharepoint is a web based application that provides document management and collaboration, provides content management features, implements business processes, and manages access to information.

 

Microsoft Sharepoint specifically supports the DEOC COP by providing the ability to:

• Manage emergency response driven information. Information is entered into forms or pulled in from external systems and presented back in real-time.
• Automate workflows and processes. Workflows have been implemented to replace manual processes.
• Easily find information. Enterprise level search tools and functionality are used to facilitate finding information.
• Visualize information. Charts, graphs, maps, and reports are utilized to visually represent data providing a quick method to analyze information.