LiveProcess helps one of the nation's businest trauma centers 'make it happen'

Several days before Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in August 2005, members of the Grady Health System emergency management team and other regional coordinating hospitals of the state were in a hotel conference room in Macon to work with LiveProcess, a company that has developed the first standardized solution for healthcare disaster and emergency readiness and reaction.

Grady was there at the invitation of LiveProcess founder Nathaniel Weiss to see the system in action, and work with company officials on design, programming and final preparation issues before going live. Not long after sitting down to watch a flash demo of the program, Emergency Manager Charlotte Clark had an epiphany. “When a slide came up showing the LiveProcess Hazard Vulnerability Analysis (HVA) tool and and a wizard that helps you build one online, I was completely blown away,” she recalls with almost teenage exuberance. “We were so thrilled to see it because we had been struggling with a number of issues, including that. The HVA alone showed me that LiveProcess was worth every penny.”

The irony of that fateful meeting is not lost on Clark, whose team had to spring into action the very next day in a rapid deployment to Dobbins Air Reserve Base in Marietta, GA, where they would spend the coming weeks with Katrina and her nasty stepsister, Rita – without LiveProcess – coordinating the transfers of patients flown from evacuated hospitals in Louisiana and Beaumont, TX. Working mostly by landlines and cell phones, Clark and her team coordinated efforts with the Cobb County health department and the National Disaster Medical System and located beds for more than 2,000 evacuees.

Grady without LiveProcess...

Grady Health System, whose flagship Grady Memorial Hospital is the only level I trauma center in northern Georgia, is one of 12 designated by the Georgia Department of Public Health as a regional coordinating hospital, which leads in planning and coordinating regional hospital resources within their respective territories during disasters. Grady Health System coordinates 37 healthcare organizations (34 hospitals and three neighborhood health centers) in the metropolitan Atlanta area.

“My cell phone kept re-booting because I was using it so much, and many of us spent six days talking non-stop on rotary dial phones,” said Clark, whose team made sure patients were triaged correctly, placed into ambulance units and transported to hospitals as far north as Toccoa and Dalton, and as far south as Macon. “We were stuffing patients everywhere we possibly could.” The team’s work during Rita was no less stressful. “We were evacuating a lot of very critically ill patients from Beaumont facilities, one of whom had major heart surgery the day before,” she said. “We literally saturated all of the hospitals with those patients, and we were doing all of this by hand.”

After the dust had settled and back at home base in 953-bed Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Clark recalled some of the major features she told Weiss she wanted to have in LiveProcess.

The Realization...

“After Katrina and Rita, we really learned what we needed to have,” she said. “We wanted an online event log. We needed to have it live. And when someone keys something in that log, it needed to refresh every few seconds so people could see immediately what everyone needs in an emergency, what patients need to be sent and where the capacity is.”

The Katrina and Rita experience showed Clark, for example, how invaluable it would have been to know at a glance beforehand what kind of neighborhood health centers were available to take care of the “walking wounded,” many of whom were less in need of emergency medical care and more in need of simple vital signs, medication and shelter.

“If we had been able to use LiveProcess during Katrina and Rita, I’m absolutely positive things would have been handled more efficiently,” said Clark.”