Compliance, readiness part of everyday job in hospitals

VERONA, NJ (July 8, 2010) Oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico as news reports pour out details of BP’s ill-prepared incident management plan and capabilities. Among those shaking their heads are healthcare emergency management professionals, for whom preparation, regulation and incident management are everyday activities and requirements.

“There are numerous precedents in other industries where rigorous requirements for contingency planning are monitored closely and require exercises to test and improve their plans regularly,” notes Mitch Saruwatari, VP of quality and compliance for LiveProcess, a New Jersey-based company that helps hospitals and regional health officials prepare for both everyday and large-scale incidents.

According to reports, the oil giant’s contingency plans for the Gulf mentioned animals such as walruses, indicating those plans were taken directly from those for a response written to respond to a spill in Alaska, obviously very different from the habitats being polluted in the Gulf.  Other recent reports from the U.S. Coast Guard indicate that the barrels of oil that BP could clean up in a day is not a tenth of the thousands of barrels the oil company said could be mitigated.

In a blog posting on LiveProcess’s website, blog.liveprocess.com, Saruwatari offers up lessons BP can learn from healthcare emergency preparedness, an industry responsible daily for millions of lives, a business under constant scrutiny and regulation:

• Assess all risks, even low-probability ones. Healthcare emergency preparedness usually begins with an assessment of hazards that could impact a facility.  Then plans are crafted to address the high-risk threats.  High-impact, low-probability events are almost always included in their plans.  Simply ask anyone that lives in a tornado, hurricane or earthquake area and it’s very likely they have well-tested plans in place.
• Assume that any event could become a long-term event. Healthcare conducts business impact analysis (BIA) to identify critical business functions that could be impacted by any hazard and subsequently develops continuity of operations plans (COOP) or business continuity plans (BCP) that ensure these functions continue in order to maintain patient care services.
• Work closely with your community partners. Healthcare emergency coordinators work closely with their communities for planning and testing of plans. This transparency makes the plans more realistic and helps all agencies work together with greater accountability and clear expectations.
• Adhere to regulatory guidelines. Healthcare is highly scrutinized by regulators and standards organizations.  There are numerous local, state and federal requirements that continuously review and challenge healthcare’s planning efforts.  While having so many different organizations and agencies is often tedious, it also helps prevent any planning gaps.

To read the entire blog post or to make a comment, please visit blog.liveprocess.com.

About LiveProcess
LiveProcess is the market leader in web-based emergency preparedness and incident management for healthcare. The LiveProcess platform provides hospitals, other healthcare providers and public health agencies with the ability to evaluate and manage their own preparedness and state of readiness, and coordinate their response to small incidents through large-scale healthcare emergencies.

LiveProcess was recently named to Inc. Magazine’s list of America’s fastest-growing private companies with a three-year growth rate of 620 percent. For more information, visit www.liveprocess.com.

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