Dennis Jones spends his days preparing for the worst. As the State Hospital Community Preparedness Coordinator for the Georgia Division of Public Health, it's his responsibility to ensure that the state's network of hospitals and healthcare providers are ready for action should a disaster strike.

It's a daunting task. Georgia has 150 Acute Care Hospitals, 276 EMS providers and 21 primary community health centers and thousands of employees spread out over the state's 160,000 square miles. Jones, his small staff in Atlanta, and 18 district emergency coordinators throughout the state work year-round providing educational programs, training and equipment designed to maximize the Georgia health community's ability to respond to an infectious disease outbreak, bio-terror attack or similar emergency scenario.

"Our goal is to make sure that we don't lose facilities if a mass casualty event occurs," Jones said. "Those facilities have to keep running if we're to protect the public."

In addition to things like help in surge capacity planning and delivery of big-ticket items like communications and de-contamination equipment, Jones' team works to provide services that have day-to-day value for the healthcare facilities and personnel. "If we can give people things they're going to use everyday, they're going to be better prepared if a major event happens," Jones said.

As a result, Jones' office delivers varied services such as trauma care classes for nurses and doctors and mental health training in coping with disasters. Recently it also provided the state's healthcare facilities with access to a powerful new emergency planning and preparedness system called LiveProcess.

LiveProcess combines a broad range of emergency planning and preparedness tools—Incident Command System (ICS), Hazard Vulnerability Analysis (HVA), Resource Management, disaster drills and quizzing, even inter-facilities communication and document sharing into a single web-based system that can be used from anywhere with nothing more than a web browser and Internet connection.

Jones was first introduced to LiveProcess by the Georgia Hospital Association (GHA) who was working on a statewide pandemic flu response plan that included the use of LiveProcess. A registered nurse and disaster planner for a 500 bed hospital before accepting his post with the Georgia Division of Public Health, Jones said he was "very impressed with the LiveProcess system" from the first time he saw it demonstrated.

"The way LiveProcess is woven together, I could see that this program would allow hospitals to reach higher levels of preparedness," he said. "It provides a common platform that gives you an overhead view of your facility's preparedness—things like bed count—as well as facilitate internal staff access to disaster plans and updates."

According to Jones, among LiveProcess' many notable features is the drills and exercises component, a tool that "would have helped me greatly back when I was a disaster planner in the hospital," he said. Additionally he remarked that the HVA component has been a huge help because, for the past six years, the state of Georgia has required that all hospitals perform a regular Hazard Vulnerability Analysis.

"The HVA makes it very easy for the hospital coordinator to see how well prepared they are for a variety of hazards," Jones said. Normally a time consuming and fairly detailed process, LiveProcess makes it so "even an inexperienced person can perform an HVA."

One of LiveProcess' other stand-out features is the ability to share documents among facilities. "Before we used to send out an email or listserv announcement asking 'does anyone have a pan-flu plan?' Then someone would distribute the plan the same way," Jones said. "Now we can put a plan template on the LiveProcess system and everyone has immediate access to it. It makes it much easier to learn from hospitals who perhaps had this problem before."

In 2005 Jones' office agreed to provide the GHA with the investment it needed to make the LiveProcess system available to hospitals statewide. Tapping funds the state receives from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, training for hospital staff began in December. Four months later 91% of the state's qualifying facilities are certified as LiveProcess trained.

Given the number of hospitals and personnel that have to be coordinated, Jones is pleased with how quickly the systems has been widely implemented, but he's not resting on his laurels yet. Of the remaining 9% he said "we're still shooting to have everyone up and online by the end of the year".

Still early in the implementation and with many hospitals at varying levels of readiness, Jones is very pleased with what LiveProcess is delivering. "The information and communications tools we have through LiveProcess makes us better able to respond," he said. "This program is significantly improving each hospital's preparedness."

Asked if he believed Georgia was now better prepared for a major event than most states thanks to his office and LiveProcess, Jones is demure. "There are a lot of people involved in preparedness here in Georgia and around the country," he said. "In deference to my colleagues and all the other people working very hard, I don't want to say that we're better prepared than anyone else."

According to the non-profit Trust In America's Health new bio-terrorism scorecard however, Georgia ranks solidly among the top ten best prepared states. "Top ten is good enough for me," Jones said. "We'll keep working hard to stay there."

LiveProcess will be there to help.