TISP Provides Support for Community Health Resilience Arlington, VA – Over our first ten years as a public private collaboration network, The Infrastructure Security Partnership (TISP) has developed its expertise base in many of the core critical infrastructure sectors. In 2011, we have expanded our network to include the public health and healthcare communities by partnering with the Office of Health Affairs in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to form the Community Health Resilience (CHR) Task Force. Chaired by Jeffrey Stiefel, Ph.D., of the Health Threats Resilience Directorate in the Office of Health Affairs at DHS, the CHR Task Force will act as a sounding board for the federal agencies and regional health alliances in their effort to coordinate the exchange of community health information, analysis for situational awareness, and intra-local and inter-local communications network. Experts from all aspects of the healthcare and public health sector will be invited to participate in The Community Health Resilience Summit (CHRS) located in Arlington, Virginia, on August 10th and 11th. CHRS will highlight current initiatives and capabilities to develop situational awareness to enhance community health resilience; our goal is to identify synergies and areas of cooperation that can be applied nationwide. The major focus of CHRS is to discuss existing best practices, approaches, tools, technologies and activities that can be leveraged to develop an interoperable system that is readily scalable to meet the requirements of multiple public, private sector and non-profit stakeholders. The two-day event is sponsored by the Office of Health Affairs at DHS in corporation with the HHS and TISP. The CHR Task Force will include attendees of the 2011 Summit. Community resilience requires improved preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery, which are dependent on timely, accurate, and available information at the grass-roots to global levels to assure health, safety and quality of life. Health security and resilience are priority considerations under steady state conditions and of greatest concern in major events and disasters. In addition, routine health and behavioral surveillance can produce indicators that if correlated and assessed, can illuminate emerging threats. Resilience requires the participation of a wide array of key stakeholders. As the 2010 DHS Quadrennial Homeland Security Review underscores, “Homeland security is a shared responsibility for which all elements of society—from individuals and communities, to the private sector, to state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, to nongovernmental organizations who serve diverse constituencies to the Federal Government—have a vital role to play.’’ Community resilience has grown at the local and state levels, as well as the interest among healthcare, public health and other government, businesses, non-profit and community organizations in developing cost-effective, robust capabilities for data exchange and two-way information sharing that can serve their needs. There has been investment in development and application of electronic health information systems to streamline, accelerate and make more cost-effective reporting of laboratory information, record-keeping of patient-related data, and health-trends analysis. Such information exchange initiatives are underway in a number of states. At the same time, lessons learned from the H1N1 pandemic response and incidents with extensive health-related impacts emphasize the need for situational awareness. Providing a common operating picture in emergency situations can inform decision-making to be made on health-related issues to facilitate and expedite response and recovery. In May, please visit www.tisp.org for more information about the TISP Community Health Resilience Task Force and The 2011 Community Health Resilience Summit. If you are interested in participating, please contact Bill Anderson, (Director & COO of TISP) via e-mail at wanderson@tisp.org. |
