FY 2021 Regional Disaster Health Response System

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When disaster strikes, communities need their health care system to be ready to respond. However, previous large-scale disasters and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate that even the most prepared communities struggle to effectively deliver health care services in times of crisis. To address gaps in health care delivery during disasters, ASPR developed a Regional Disaster Health Response System (RDHRS). The RDHRS is a tiered system that builds upon and unifies existing assets within states and across regions that supports a more coherent, comprehensive, and capable health care disaster response system able to respond health security threats. The RDHRS integrates clinical and health care systems’ operational expertise into existing preparedness and response structures at the local, state, and regional level, and expands capabilities and capacity for improving disaster readiness across the health care system, increasing medical surge capacity, and providing specialty care - including trauma, burn and infectious disease, among others - during large-scale disasters or public health emergencies. RDHRS sites build on existing medical surge and disaster preparedness foundations across industry and government, fostering and mature multi-state partnerships as well as industry assets to create an integrated, tiered system of disaster health care. The RDHRS is designed to complement existing Medical Surge Capacity and Capability (MSCC) , foundation for local or sub-state medical response (e.g., trauma systems and health care coalitions (HCCs)) by enhancing coordination mechanisms and incorporating discrete clinical and administrative capabilities at the state and regional levels. The HCCs serve as partnerships between core member stakeholders in health care, emergency medical services (EMS), public health, and emergency management. These coalitions are focused on facilitating an integrated and coordinated response across the local area. The RDHRS complements these local efforts through statewide and regional surge capacity building, situational awareness, readiness metric development, and capability testing exercises, among other regional efforts. While the RDHRS operates at a regional level to enhance health care disaster preparedness and response, the RDHRS is not intended to alter or displace current local patient referral patterns. It is instead intended to define the delivery of clinical care when the existing referral patterns and health care delivery capacity and capabilities are exceeded by catastrophic events (requiring either redistribution of patients, importation of resources, or resource utilization guidelines).

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