Health Alert Network Officer Tom Boeckmann was tasked with developing a strategy for enabling redundant voice communication between all 117 hospitals across Iowa. 

The Situation:

Iowa is primarily a rural state, and our health system relies upon regional and statewide planning and resource support.  Hospitals have also relied upon landline and cellular phone services to communicate with each other.  But, these services won't be available in many types of disasters. 

Experience shows that public phone systems and cellular systems become overwhelmed and unusable during disasters.  In fact, cellular services may be intentionally shut down like they were immediately following the London bombings.  They were turned off to prevent use of celluar networks to activate or trigger additional strikes. 

Internet services also become too congested.

When this happens, how will hospitals communicate with each other to communicate critical announcements and coordinate resources - bed availability, physicians, nurses, pharmaceuticals, ambulance services, etc?

Our hospitals are not set up to be completely isolated or independent.  In fact, there are only a few Level 1 Trauma Centers that serve all Iowans.  Communication between our hospitals would be critical to responding to major health outbreaks, bio-terrorism, and high casualty/high injury disasters. 

The Problem:

Two-way radio and satellite phones are the only reliable alternatives for voice communications.  Satellite phones, however are extremely expensive to use and require users to be outdoors in order to "see" the satellites.

The hospitals needed a two-way radio system that provided coverage across the entire state, but building their own would be cost prohibitive (tens of millions of dollars).

The Solution:

Tom found an existing radio network with statewide coverage that was built for mission critical public safety use.  It provided coverage to all the hospitals and unlimited access.

CDC Grants funded the purchase of a control station radio for each hospital, the State Emergency Operation Center, Poison Control, the University Hygienic Lab and the Emergency Communications Center. 

The Results:

The results are numerous and provide a foundation by which the system can continue expanding to include more agencies and resources.  

·         Phase 1 - Completed.  All hospitals can speak to each other in a statewide group, regionally in a group, or individually hospital to hospital.

·         Each hospital can speak directly with Poison Control, the University Hygienics Lab, the SEOC, ECC and the HAN Officer

·         Phase 2 - Completed.  All local Public Health Agencies (99 counties) joined the network with the same functionality as each hospital and complete interoperability.

·        All radios and usage were purchased by CDC and HRSA grants and cost less than the annual maintenance alone would have been on a new network.

Expansion / Interoperability:

Iowa Department of Agriculture (IDALS) equipped all its regional and state veterinarians with portable radios that can operate independently within IDALS and can operate on the hospital/public health channels.

County Emergency Operation Centers are beginning to join the network, along with the six dispatch centers for Iowa State Patrol and three of the state's 6 Law Enforcement Intelligent Network (LEIN) Regions.

The system has evolved from strictly a redundant communication network to also being a platform for statewide interoperability among interested agencies.

References:

Available upon request.