Bringing Mission Integration to Health Preparedness and Response
Booz Allen helps government organizations work together to understand and prepare for public health crises.
Several federal government policies and directives mandate that government organizations with health preparedness or response missions coordinate in the event of a natural or manmade disaster. Bringing together and integrating the missions of organizations government wide to collectively prepare, protect, respond, and recover from the effects of disaster is an enormous undertaking.
Booz Allen’s Cole Slattery has more than 26 years experience in health preparedness, including 21 years as a medical planner for the Army Medical Department. Since joining Booz Allen, he has supported TRAC2ES, a firm-built and managed- military IT solution for patient evacuation, as well as other Department of Defense and Department of Health and Human Services clients. He talked with boozallen.com about helping clients integrate missions across the healthcare landscape.
boozallen.com: What are some of the challenges our clients face around the issue of health preparedness?
Slattery: The National Response Framework outlines 15 planning scenarios that pose the greatest potential threat to American citizens. The scenarios cover events such as chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks; major hurricanes and earthquakes; even a cyber attack. Just about all of them have a health preparedness or health response component to address public heath threats, needs and the gaps that separate them. Health preparedness planning addresses the requirement to effectively manage resources to close the gap. Our planning and mission integration efforts involve all levels of government, civil society, and commercial enterprise to develop solutions with the most resilient effect and lasting impact.
When you look closely at the scenarios, you realize that preparing for and responding to any of these events would involve government entities across the spectrum, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, and Health and Human Services; the intelligence community; and any number of state and local agencies.
Our clients are realizing the enormity of effort needed to coordinate their resources to respond to a disaster. So the biggest challenge is for governments and agencies to really understand themselves, the capabilities of the other players, and their role in the overall mission.
boozallen.com: It sounds like health preparedness has mission integration written all over it.
Slattery: Yes. Mission integration helps disparate organizations examine their critical mission responsibilities and identify where their missions interrelate or overlap with those of other organizations. Mission integration helps develop a common understanding of everyone’s missions, responsibilities, authorities, capabilities, and limitations, so that all the stakeholders can contribute to a solution.
boozallen.com: How is Booz Allen helping clients in this effort?
Slattery: We have done a lot of work in health care and mission integration. For instance, a major initiative is improving the level of care for our wounded warriors that are returning seriously injured from Iraq and Afghanistan. We created a megacommunity™ that brought together all of the agencies and other entities that touch the reintegration of these returning warfighters. For the first time, they were able to see the entire system of care as a continuum that required the coordinated efforts of all the stakeholders.
Another area we’ve been working in is an important application called syndromic surveillance. It’s a method for gathering and collecting data on reported illnesses early, before they become widespread. With that early-warning information, public health officials could begin preparing the public and implementing mitigating strategies and treatment protocols.
We conducted a strategic simulation about pandemics. From that we developed a pandemic simulator that models potential patterns of a disease’s spread based on geographical information, population density, transportation methods, and other factors. This provides a great tool for public health officials to assess needed resources before a serious outbreak.
Recently we sponsored a health preparedness, all-hazards summit in Washington D.C., bringing together leaders in business and industry and from all levels of government to work on a common understanding of the “All Hazard” threats that face our nation. From this start point, we began the work of developing preparedness plans through collaborative analysis, looking at their collective resources, and committing themselves and their partners to prepare for or respond to a catastrophic national or regional event if it did happen.
Those are just a few examples of how we work with clients to collaborate and integrate their missions.
boozallen.com: You have described enormous challenges for our clients—and the country—as well as the huge effort required from the wide range of stakeholders involved in health preparedness. What kinds of expertise and capabilities does Booz Allen bring to this issue?
Slattery: Working with clients in this area requires a truly cross-firm effort. We draw experts from almost all of our functional areas, including our home team within assurance and resilience; IT; organization and strategy; strategic communications; economic and business analysis; and modeling, simulation, wargaming, and analysis. We have broad and deep knowledge of the defense, civil government, security, and intelligence domains contributed by staff who worked in these areas before coming to Booz Allen.
Our global health staff includes a number of clinical providers and military and public health medical planners who are recognized industry-wide for their thought leadership and contributions to the literature of their fields.
We work with clients at a strategic level, helping them frame the picture of the future for their organizations and prepare for what might be next in health preparedness.
Q&A posted April 6, 2009
