Overview of health care response to high consequence events: Current state of the industry and future needs

Progress is being made on improving emergency preparedness at hospitals. Federal funding has been directed to improve the capability of federal agency response, while largely hospital-borne activities have gone to achieve preparedness and emergency planning at hospitals. This comes at a time of particular concern for the health care industry. The health care industry currently faces a number of challenges concurrent with attempts by the federal government to establish approaches to incident management that can be scaled and implemented consistently at the local level. The prevailing approach in the medical community emphasizes technology and experience transfer from other settings, while accounting for unique differences in organizational approach and setting. Because they are so new to the health care industry, few opportunities have been presented, through practice and experience, to validate these approaches.