The American Medical Association (AMA) seeks to promote the health, safety, and resilience of internally displaced populations in a disaster or public health emergency by establishing and promoting a standardized health security card, which contains essential data elements necessary for healthcare providers, and local, tribal, and state health departments to identify individuals, meet their immediate health needs, better access critical data, and better obtain surveillance and situational awareness, thereby minimizing morbidity and mortality in at- risk populations. An overarching participatory management methodology will be utilized to reach this goal.
Specific aims i nclude: 1) To utilize a multidisciplinary private-public stakeholder team to achieve consensus on the essential data elements necessary for a health security card for use in disasters and public health emergencies. 2) To establish consensus on the technological vehicle and platform for the card. 3) To refine and validate the vehicle and platform for the card through a series of focus groups targeting at-risk populations. 4) To disseminate the health security card to a nationally representative sample (n=1000), with an oversampling of at-risk populations, through selected training centers of the National Disaster Life SupportTM (NDLSTM) Program and in conjunction with local, tribal, and state public health departments, representing all FEMA regions. 5) To conduct a 6-week and 6-month follow-up evaluation and reliability test of the health security card and public health systems platform against the In Case of Emergency Prescription History Service (ICERx.org), a national medication record and pharmaceutical database. Analysis will include frequency of logins by the 6-week and 6-month time intervals, as well as completeness and accuracy of medication information compared with the ICERx medication database. A follow-up 6-month telephone survey will be conducted of all participants to determine subjective usability and portability of the health security card. The AMA is very capable of achieving success by virtue of its experience in building systems-level relationships and programs, and through its ability to leverage these networks to assist affected populations in a disaster or public health emergency. Building on past efforts, a primary goal of this project is to move the dissemination and utilization of an enhanced personal health information card from the clinician-patient model to a caregiver- population model to enable the deployment of the card across state-lines, especially for those most vulnerable and at greatest risk in a disaster or public health emergency.
The AMA seeks to promote the health, safety, and resilience of populations affected by a disaster or public health emergency by establishing and promoting a standardized health security card, which contains essential information to identify individuals and meet their immediate health needs. Building on past efforts, the proposed project will move the dissemination and utilization of an enhanced card from a clinician-patient model to a caregiver- population model to enable the deployment of the card across state-lines at the population level, especially for those most vulnerable and at greatest risk. It is believed that the health security card can have a dual function by raising awareness and health literacy of at-risk populations thereby impacting and benefiting day-to-day clinical care, reducing overall healthcare costs, and improving individual and community resilience.
