LiveProcess has created a great deal of renewed interest and excitement in the emergency preparedness process at Grady. “A lot of doctors now volunteer to be on our emergency management steering committee because they want the experience,” she said. “We’ve actually had to turn people down. Other hospitals can hardly drag people into these kinds of meetings.”

Some of the LiveProcess features that Clark said have stirred such excitement include:

• Event Logging and Management - "Most people in the Grady Health System first encounter LiveProcess through the event log. It’s a happening place,” she said. “It’s a fantastic tool, because you have a lot of people already set up on the fly. I can send a blast message from an 800 number, or from my cell or Blackberry, or even the web, and it instantaneously goes out to everyone’s cell, work or home phone, or their e-mail. Event logs are invaluable tools for meeting the documentation requirements of The Joint Commission as well."

• Hazard Vulnerability Analysis - The LiveProcess Hazard and Vulnerability Analysis tool is an interactive resource that can be completed and continually updated electronically from any location, something particularly useful following major real-life events and drills. The HVA provides scores and overall risk values in key areas and helps ensure that relevant policies, procedures, and training methods are in place. "When the HVA shows you where your gaps are, you can make the corrections and even create exercises to test it," Clark said. "Our HVA allows me to also compare it with other hospitals in the region, our own zip code, or whatever parameter I set. In our case, after completing the preparedness questionnaire in 2005, we saw that our pharmacy needed to have more work in training and advance notice. We were able to quickly correct that. We frankly didn’t even know all the right questions to ask when doing our assessment, but the LiveProcess HVA tool did."

• Training and Testing - The ability to pre-assign and train personnel for a real hospital emergency is a daunting task for any emergency manager, requiring extensive documentation, and communication and coordination skills. LiveProcess includes an automatic drill engine, giving managers like Clark the ability to prepare customized event-specific exercises, create victim profiles and share them with emergency planners at other facilities, and measure staff competency. Personnel also can import useful information such as photos and documents, so others can learn from previous exercises, and access an online policy repository and reference library. "The drill engine is very cool," said Clark. "You simply put in a date and time you want an exercise to start and it will continue to feed information to the system. A lot of the stuff we used to have to do manually is now automated, saving lots of time and money." The program also streamlines the training and testing process with quizzes that gauge personnel proficiency in key emergency preparedness and response scenarios, providing instant results about strengths and weaknesses. "These quizzes are fantastic, especially after we do an exercise," Clark said. "With over 7,500 employees here, you can see why."

• Documentation and Compliance - Emergency management professionals in hospitals need to deal with a lot of documentation and complex regulatory and procedural issues, as well as share accurate and timely information with different departments before, during and after an emergency or disaster event. LiveProcess allows a facility to easily comply with documentation policies and standards from every agency, including OSHA, Joint Commission and the National Incident Management System. "There is so much required documentation and paper trails it can make your head spin," said Clark. "Instead of printing out a lot of paper, all of it is right there within a few mouse clicks on Live Process. Its search engine is very cool, too, because it allows you to quickly find the document you need."

• Information Sharing - LiveProcess provides each hospital with a large storage library that can be accessed by any staff at any time. This simplifies access to new or automatically updated emergency response plans and templates from any Internet browser and immediately enables appropriate direction for meeting any hospital issue. Hospitals may also share all or portions of their libraries with outside organizations. "If someone was a department head here at Grady and got stuck in an ice storm during a live emergency, LiveProcess allows them to manage it remotely," she said. "We have an Intranet here at Grady, but if you’re on the other side of the firewall, you can’t get to important documents. But that’s not the case with LiveProcess. It’s fabulous because you can actually manage an incident from your home or hotel room and still be a viable heavily producing person handling the situation." Clark finds the information sharing capability invaluable. "A hospital in Savannah has some great policies, and we’ve made use of them with our own here," she said. "On the flip side, Grady Health System has one of the best decontamination teams in the state (the state's only Poison Center is housed at Grady Memorial Hospital), so a lot of hospitals in Georgia use it as a template." While some hospitals in the past were shy about sharing things, LiveProcess is breaking down those walls. "The regional coordinating hospitals here is Georgia are considered mentors, so we try to help the really small hospitals with their planning and to make sure they get copies of our policies so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel," Clark said. "It truly allows us to plan together, instead of in a vacuum."

• Inter-faciity Collaboration and Cooperation - Hospitals and emergency response agencies have always cooperated during a crisis. But LiveProcess seems to provide a higher level of awareness and collaboration Clark hasn’t seen before. "Because we’re a regional coordinating hospital, we want to have as many people involved in any kind of situation we have," said Clark, who’s given police, fire, other emergency agencies – even the metropolitan medical strike team – in her region the ability to log into Live Process and monitor a situation. "This gives them the ability to shoot a message to us and offer assistance or resources, if necessary. So, there’s really a ‘scratch your back, I scratch yours’ kind of thing always going on. It really takes the stress off many situations."

We make it happen...

Still, after using LiveProcess now for a little over two years, Clark is hard-pressed to say which feature she likes best.

“The major reasons we chose LiveProcess were we were able to configure it the way we wanted it to look and it gave us an event log so we could handle large mass casualty incidents and have immediate contact with everybody online,” she said.

LiveProcess is planning to unveil a series of enhancements that will include a new Compliance Suite that tracks and helps complete the 2008 Joint Commission Emergency Management Standards, an enhanced drill engine that will allow system users to more easily create disaster exercises that target key facility and community hazards, and faster and more scalable architecture designed for easy implementation of future updates.

Even without those enhancements, Clark said she was sold “a long time ago” on all that LiveProcess has to offer. "What’s my overall impression of LiveProcess? It’s totally cool," she said. "One of our supervisors here who goes about his job in a quiet, unassuming way but can be personally credited with doing a lot of things that have saved lives once said during a meeting, 'I was just doing my job.' And we adopted that as our motto – we are just doing our job. LiveProcess is all about sharing, planning and responding together to make things happen."