University Times

With a big boost from the federal government, western Pennsylvania will be upgrading its disaster response capabilities.

UPMC announced last week that it has received $8.5 million from the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, of which Rep. John P. Murtha (D.-Johnstown) is a ranking member, to build a strategic biodefense emergency operations and communications system.

Murtha was in Pittsburgh Jan. 26, along with UPMC and Pennsylvania National Guard officials, to outline the emergency information management project, which seeks to close the communication gaps among disaster responders, centralize command structures, design a real-time biodefense informational web portal to educate civilians and provide training models with the latest information to assist public safety and health care professionals in the event of a natural or human-caused public health disaster.

Murtha said that Pittsburgh’s proximity to New York City and Washington, D.C., two potential targets of terror attacks, make it a likely emergency overflow response center in the event of such a strike. “[Pittsburgh] also is within 500 miles of 50 percent of the population in the United States,” he pointed out.

Moreover, Murtha said, Pittsburgh already is among the nation’s most prepared cities, in part because UPMC recently has invested $400 million in information technology that can support the new biodefense system.

Implementing the proposed biodefense system, he said, will make the western Pennsylvania region a model for the rest of the nation on how to provide up-to-the-minute information to health care providers, the National Guard, local government officials and the general population in the event of large-scale bioterrorism attacks, pandemics or other major emergencies with serious public health consequences.

Tara O’Toole, chief executive officer of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, said that improving communication channels among the military, health care professionals and the civilian population is the first step. “Whether it’s a flu pandemic, or bioterrorism or a natural disaster you have to know where the resources are in the first place, including hospitals and the military,” she said. “Hospitals, lamentably, have not been involved much in homeland security.”

Equally important, O’Toole maintained, is to develop “situational awareness,” that is, to provide information in real time of rapidly changing events during a disaster.

“What is the location of the victims? How many are there? What hospitals can deal right now with victims and which ones are full? What equipment is available — stretchers, wheelchairs, ventilators — and where is it?” O’Toole cited as fluctuating situations in a crisis.

O’Toole described the biodefense system’s four main components as follows:

• The biodefense incident command center will provide real-time information to responding agencies, including the bed, staffing and response capacity of local health care facilities and the location and availability of emergency equipment and other resources.

• An emergency mass notification system, built upon UPMC’s MedCall technology, simultaneously will alert more than 70,000 regional emergency responders, physicians, government officials and National Guard units to a crisis situation.

• A biodefense web portal will provide the general public with critical information for coping with a disaster and its aftermath. Had the portal been on line in 2004 when the fringe effect of Hurricane Ivan flooded parts of Pittsburgh, UPMC officials said, it would have aided disaster response by providing information about open emergency shelters, road closings and locations of tetanus shot clinics.

• A biodefense “schoolhouse” will provide the latest training models in disaster preparedness to assist military, public safety and health care personnel in gaining specialized knowledge for a variety of natural and human-made disasters. Educators and experts in military training will recommend the curricula, officials said.

“What’s new about this system is that hospitals will be involved and the system unites communication between civil and military responders,” O’Toole said. Typical emergency operations incorporate communications with police, ambulance and fire units, but “the health care delivery sector hasn’t been part of the picture,” she pointed out. “The end result will be organizations with the ability to make decisions, communicate and take coordinated actions across a region during a crisis.”

A drill to test the new system is expected to be conducted in the fall, O’Toole said.

UPMC President Jeffrey A. Romoff said that U.S. disaster response capabilities were exposed as inadequate by the Sept. 11 attacks as well as by chaotic government efforts to respond to Hurricane Katrina.

“The 9/11 commission report said the capacity of this country to respond to a catastrophic invasion is limited at best and highly inadequate. Despite the heroism of the responders, the commission said this country flunked in most respects,” Romoff said.

“With Katrina, the resources were there, but the ability to coordinate them had completely broken down,” he added.

“This unprecedented biodefense system will place western Pennsylvania’s bioterrorism preparedness initiatives among the top tier in the United States,” Romoff said.

“It will solve a national problem by providing a template to efficiently organize disaster responses so that medical resources are directed where they are most needed.”

Referring to UPMC’s commitment to the proposed system, Murtha said, “These guys are not just going to do a study, they’re going to get something done. We all hope a crisis doesn’t happen, but we need to look ahead. If it’s going to happen, we need to be prepared.”

He said the region’s next priority is to develop a vaccine-producing industry to help offset U.S. dependence on importing vaccines. “Most of our vaccines are made out of the country, in China, for example,” Murtha said. If push comes to shove, foreign countries will preserve their vaccine for their own people, he added. “There’s a lot of money available for this. Unfortunately, it will take about five years. I hope we have that much time.”

—Peter Hart