The United States Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that they have awarded $916 million in emergency preparedness grants for states this year, which includes $332 million for hospitals. The funding is meant to help hospitals address potential public health threats in states, eight U.S. territories, and four of the nation's largest urban centers: Washington D.C., Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.

To find out more about how hospital disaster preparedness continues to evolve in response to high-profile events like Hurricane Sandy and the Boston bombings, DOTmed News spoke with Dr. David Marcozzi, director of the National Healthcare Preparedness Programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Marcozzi previously served at the White House as the director of public health policy for the Homeland Security Council and then as director of all-hazards medical preparedness policy for the National Security staff.

DMBN: We hear that hospitals are moving toward coalition building — partly because government funding is increasingly tied to such efforts. What are your thoughts on this?
DM: I'm heartened to hear that hospitals are registering this as a trend. This has been a significant sea change, a pivot from where we were before, which was facility-based, to a move toward coalitions. We're trying to steer the nation so health care competitors can work together during disasters to provide effective care.

Multiple events have reinforced the efficacy of this approach, including anecdotal evidence: countless times we've heard that when one hospital went down during an emergency, it pulled through when other hospitals came to its aid.

This was also demonstrated from a preparedness standpoint in formal action reviews. As a group of facilities come together and work together, we found we had better responses. An entire health community has to respond to an event. That's why this move toward coalitions was thought about in 2011.

DMBN: Business continuity is another hot topic in hospital preparedness, we hear.

DM: Funny you should mention this. We have two program measures — one of them is around medical surge, and the other is continuity of business. If you can't continue to operate, we can't expect you to provide medical surge. Business continuity is a challenge — it's an insurance policy. Do you have an infrastructure so that you can operate during an event?

For the first time this year, we're going to have stable measures for the next three years that we can track through time to try and quantify and come up with a science to track the effectiveness of business continuity for our coalitions.

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