Health Experts Prepare For Regional Crises

Signal, Feb 2004 by Ackerman, Robert K

Facility consolidates information flous and expert access.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has prepared for a serious health event-including a biological attack-anywhere in the United States by building a multimedia command center in its Washington, D.C., headquarters. This facility serves both to present all the necessary information to a decision maker and to establish vital communications links to emergency responders even during a devastating public health event such as a pandemic or a bioterrorism event.

The department comprises a host of health-oriented organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. These and many other organizations all fall under the direct supervision of the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the command center serves as his central point of information. The secretary is the focal person in the center-all of the briefing material for a particular incident is available at his desk, and he is able to conduct videoconferencing from that station.

This command center also serves to help department officials remain informed and make key decisions during a range of potential crises or events that may require HHS involvement. During last year's Hurricane Isabel, for example, department officials in the command center used the same hurricane models employed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. However, instead of focusing just on storm tracks, the department used the models to project how many people might require emergency assistance during and after the storm.

Most of the personnel staffing the center are public health services officers. Some positions, such as meteorology and geospatial information systems, represent full-time staffed disciplines. In many cases, staffers are multidisciplinary, including dual-master's personnel.

While a small crew works during off hours late at night, the center can accommodate 26 people at individual workstations when preparedness or homeland security threat levels rise. And, the composition of these staffers varies with the situation. The crew during a hurricane would be vastly different in specialization from that required to cover a potential biohazard event, for example.

Not all of these personnel are department officials. Federal partner agencies and departments may be represented, as may nongovernmental organizations such as the American Association of Blood Banks. These personnel serve as liaisons between their groups and the department, and they are interactive in the center. all the technologies necessary for these representatives to communicate with their organizations are in place at their stations.

During last year's Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak, the Federal Aviation Administration provided data that helped predict the flow of the disease from the overseas locations of outbreaks. This flight data enabled the center to construct 24-, 48- and 72-hour prediction models of how the disease might migrate via air travelers. Experts were able to tailor surveillance of targeted entry points to detect whether the virus was entering the United States aboard an infected passenger.

Incident management software helps the department gather information in the same manner as the U.S. departments of Defense, Energy and Veterans Affairs. The first three days of Hurricane Isabel generated the equivalent of more than 6,600 pages of text, according to Dean A. Ross, director of the command center.

Geospatial information system (GIS) data is a vital element of the center's information, explains Satoshi Manabe, a program analyst who specializes in telecommunications for HHS. Having GIS information improves the ability of officials to understand an incident that is emerging or underway.

The center was built last year in only 59 days. The HHS secretary's offices are just a few steps away. Ross notes that the center was designed with substantial input from personnel with actual federal disaster experience.

The room is dominated by two walls featuring giant video displays. On one side, four large plasma-screen monitors are tuned to commercial television stations. The center can access four transponder channels to provide real-time imagery from U.S., European, Asian and Arabic satellite television networks. The screens usually are tuned to 24-hour news channels.

An adjacent wall features 10 projector screens abutting each other to form a giant video display 8,000 pixels wide by 2,400 pixels high. Operators can present a single image across all of the screens, or they can provide different displays of information on each individual screen. The projector-based system does not suffer the burn-in common to cathode-ray tubes or plasma screens, so it can display static images for long periods of time without any ill effects. One wall-length view is a global image tied to the center's custom time clock. This image shows the world as it would appear at a particular time, with a shadow illustrating the portion of the globe in night.