Development of a Process and Infrastructure to Outreach Stakeholders for Capturing Healthcare System Stress in Emergency Response Situations.

Real time data provided by frontline clinicians could be used to direct immediate resources during a public health emergency and inform increased preparedness for future events. The United States Critical Illness and Injury Trials Group Program for Emergency Preparedness (USCIIT-PREP), a group of expert critical care and emergency medicine physicians at various academic medical centers across the US, aims to enhance the national capability of rapid electronic data collection, along with analysis and dissemination of findings. To achieve these aims, USCIIT-PREP created a process for real-time data capture that relies on a curated and engaged network of clinical providers from various geographical regions to respond to short online "Pulse" queries about healthcare system stress. During a period of three years, five queries were created and distributed. The first two queries were used to develop and validate the data collection infrastructure. Results are reported for the last three queries between June 2015 and March 2016. Response rates consistently ranged from 39% to 42%. Our team demonstrated that our system and processes were ready for creation and rapid dissemination of episodic queries for rapid data collection, transmittal, and analysis through a curated national network of clinician responders during a public health emergency. USCIIT-PREP aims to further increase the response rate through additional engagement efforts within the network, to continue to grow the clinician responder database, and to optimize additional query content. This is an Open Access article. Authors own copyright of their articles appearing in the Journal of Public Health Informatics. Readers may copy articles without permission of the copyright owner(s), as long as the author and OJPHI are acknowledged in the copy and the copy is used for educational, not-for-profit purposes.