Mobile Hospital HICS Forms: How Crisis Management Works

The Hospital Incident Command System (HICS IV) has been in national use for quite some time now, leading to more structured incident management at hospitals and better integration with local Emergency Services.  Most hospitals, however, are still using paper-based systems to implement HICS during tests, drills and emergencies.  There is a better way now, made possible by leveraging the ubiquitous smart phone, to put HICS Plans, procedures and forms in the hands of your teams when they need them most. In large-scale incidents, coordinating team efforts becomes a major challenge.  If your teams are working with their plans or HICS Incident Response guides in paper form, this challenge is magnified.  Because hospitals and hospitals systems are large with complex physical infrastructure and highly mobile workforces, the logical solution is to digitize these plans and forms so they are accessible to team members via smartphone and linked to computers in the command center so the Incident Commander and Section Chiefs can see who is doing what, in real time. Crisis Management for Hospitals comes with all the HICS IV Incident Response Guides pre-loaded in interactive checklist form.  HICS forms and Job Action Sheets are also pre-loaded.  Hospitals can easily customize these plans for their own needs, and also create new ones quickly and easily. Once your plans are digitized in Crisis Management, the level of situational awareness in the command center rises dramatically.  Because all tasks and actions are time and date stamped and logged automatically, the Incident Commander and her team can see exactly what is happening via the built-in dashboards.  It’s easy to drill down for more detail, and this allows incident leadership to reallocate resources effectively if some areas are progressing slower than others. Of course in an emergency everything always goes as planned , right?  Well this is why you need to be able to customize your plans on the fly during an incident, because those plans won’t survive the first smoke of battle.  With Crisis Management you can do that quickly and easily, adding and deleting tasks, changing responsibilities, all with a few clicks. Finally, keeping Senior Leadership informed is a task all Incident Commanders and their teams face.  And it’s a legitimate need: senior leaders need to have the best information possible so they can make the right decisions under pressure, and have well-informed communications with key stakeholders, such as board members, political leaders etc.  Most organizations use conference calls or meetings to accomplish this key task, which is effective but time consuming.  Crisis Management’s dashboard and log enables leadership to self-serve to get the information they need when they need it, saving both their and HICS leadership’s time Crisis Management also works well for tests, drills and exercises- the Log allows you and your team members to effectively analyze their performance and improve it for the next time.  This process of analyzing actions and improving your future approach leads to a virtuous cycle of process and quality improvement in you emergency response activities. If you have any questions, or would like to speak with Michael Hardie or a member of the Healthcare team,  just contact us and we’ll walk you through Crisis Management and how it integrates into the Everbridge platform.