PA DOH Strategic National Stockpile Resource Management System

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) Program was introduced to assist states and communities in responding to public health emergencies, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. The SNS Program ensures the availability of medicines, antidotes, medical supplies, and medical equipment necessary for states and communities to counter the effects of biological pathogens and chemical and nerve agents. As part of this program, the Pennsylvania Department of Health (PA DOH) was charged with developing a plan to receive the federal assets within 12 hours of a declared emergency and to quickly operationalize the deployment and dispensing of these medical counter-measures. The challenge for PA DOH was that a resource management system did not exist within the Department to support the plan. A central resource database was needed to identify storage facilities, Points of Dispensing (PODs), supplies/equipment, transportation resources, and staffing for Incident Command System and National Incident Management System (NIMS) control functions.

To meet this challenge, Delta was contracted to provide planning support and a solution to maintain, track, identify, and deploy resources from the SNS: Total Visibility Resource Management System (RMS) database. As a first step, Delta’s Information Technology Services Team worked with its internal planning team and PA DOH to perform a thorough requirements gathering to ensure that both operational processes and data needs were accounted for in the software solution. A range of scenarios and conditions was reflected in the final system, including distributed data maintenance, role-based and resource-based security, Internet accessibility, logistics planning, commodity typing/NIMS classification and compliance, advanced search capabilities, and Geographic Information Systems mapping. Delta’s Total Visibility RMS was chosen as the base platform, and modifications were made to incorporate the unique operational and data requirements of the SNS Program. Once the software updates were completed, the software was deployed as an enterprise solution for the entire Commonwealth. To ensure the success of the resource management database implementation, Delta provided training to the first responder community from the nine counter terrorism task forces in Pennsylvania.

Delta utilized operations knowledge gained from its participation in the SNS and planning projects to develop comprehensive classroom and e-learning training courses that streamlined use of the system and promoted best practices identified in planning. All e-learning courses are currently published to PA DOH’s Learning Management System under SNS Planning, Distribution, and POD Operations.

PA DOH has been successfully utilizing the Total Visibility RMS since 2006, and the database currently holds over 30,000 emergency response resources. The system is used by more than 560 health and emergency officials across all of the Commonwealth’s 67 counties. Subsequent to its implementation, PA DOH has integrated Total Visibility with GATIR Health (Pennsylvania’s statewide health emergency mapping system), which is also integrated with the Pennsylvania Emergency Incident Reporting System.