Pandemic Influenza Plan - Questar III

Section 13: Public Health Preparedness Informatics
staff vaccination status and other needed information can be rapidly added to
reporting from existing HERDS templates and forms. Electronic Incidents
activated in HERDS allow for the reporting of resources needs and available for
incident command allocation between facilities. Similar HERDS reporting forms
can be deployed to additional facility types as required. Home Health, Adult
Homes and Primary Care Clinics are will be added to the HERDS system.
‣ Action items:
o Activate existing critical asset reporting forms for Nursing homes
statewide.
o Implement HERDS instances for Home Health Care and Primary Care
Clinics and deploy critical assets survey.
2. Facility-based Isolation and Infection Control. The statewide inventory of
Hospital AIIR room capacity is available through the HERDS system.
Complementary HERDS reporting forms can be established to track and mass
balance occupancy and availability. Hospital staff vaccination status, PPE
inventory and training status is also available through HERDS Critical Asset
survey and HRSA Baseline surveys. Long term care infection control, isolation
and cohorting capacities are assessed in the Nursing Home Critical asset survey.
Nosocomial-acquired influenza in hospitals and Nursing homes is tracked in the
NORA system.
3. Event Patient Tracking. Event patients presenting at health facilities can be
reported through the HERDS patient locator system which includes support for
PCR and EMS Triage Tags. A public facing query component of the patient
locator allows for de-identified look-up of facility locations of probable matches
for families searching for hospitalized relatives. The public facing look-up query
is accessed by a link from the public web site to an unauthenticated, yet secure
certified link to the commerce system.
IV. Alerting and Notification Infrastructure
A. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Systems. The IHANS system and HERDS
alerts utilize phone-based notifications. Health alerting and notification
protocols are in Appendix VI.B. On activation the HERDS system can use the
IHANS system to initiate alerting of affected facilities and jurisdictions. Phone
(land, cell, satellite, pager) notification infrastructure is supported by two IVR
systems one at the NYSDOH ESP main site and one at its DR site (800 North
Pearl St.). Each supports outbound text to speech for outbound notification
messages and keypad acknowledgement of receipt of notifications. Each IVR
supports 48 lines. Five lines are available to support the Duty Officer Call in
system these can be rapidly expended in an emergency. The IVR systems also
have the capacity to support call centers and in-bound phone surveys, however,
program requirements for implementation have not been developed.
B. Mass Fax. The IHANS system and HERDS supports fax notifications/alerting.
The fax appliance and capacity is upgraded to two digital appliances: one at the
main site at ESP and one at the DR site, each with 24 lines, for a total capacity
February 7, 2006 13-30