With the publication Dec. 15 of the nation's first comprehensive, federally financed guide to hospital emergency preparedness exercise development, the Cornell Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness, an intercampus collaboration, has provided a major tool for strengthening hospitals' ability to protect communities nationwide against public health disasters, such as creating care centers in case of an influenza pandemic or treating infections in the wake of a bioterrorism attack.

The guidebook and accompanying atlas of resources were prepared through the institute, co-directed by Dr. Nathaniel Hupert at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, and Jack Muckstadt, the Acheson-Laibe Professor of Engineering (Ithaca campus), for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' (DHHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) with funding from the DHHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. Electronic versions are available on the AHRQ website at http://www.ahrq.gov/prep/hospex.htm. Hupert, principal investigator and associate professor of public health and medicine at Weill Cornell, is also the inaugural director of the new Preparedness Modeling Unit in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Muckstadt is one of 10 members of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response at the CDC.

"This project provides much-needed material assistance for the often unheralded but critical job of making sure our nation's hospitals are prepared for the unexpected," said Hupert. "The guide is a single point of reference to help hospital preparedness exercise coordinators meet the many requirements, rules and regulations, both federal and accreditation-related, pertaining to the planning, conduct and evaluation of hospital emergency preparedness exercises."

"The work of Dr. Hupert and his colleagues in planning for scenarios that no one wants to imagine continues to be essential way of assuring the public's health," said Dr. Alvin Mushlin, chair of the Department of Public Health at Weill Cornell. "Their guidebook provides resources to help hospitals design, conduct and evaluate their own emergency preparedness exercises in order to improve their response capabilities."

In 2008, the AHRQ and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response contracted with Weill Cornell to conduct a one-year, comprehensive assessment of resources available to promote hospital preparedness exercises. The Weill Cornell research team evaluated more than 400 preparedness exercise documents and synthesized the multiple national requirements for hospital emergency exercises into a full-length guidebook and quick-reference pocket guide, along with a structured, searchable atlas of resources and tools (print and CD-ROM versions). Ten Weill Cornell medical students helped perform the structured critical analysis of the exercise materials, and the resulting documents were reviewed in Nebraska, Georgia, New York, California and Washington with input from more than 50 hospital emergency preparedness professionals, including representatives from NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

The Cornell Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness, founded in 2005, is a joint venture of Weill Cornell's Department of Public Health and the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering in the College of Engineering. The institute's vision is to build the nation's leading research and education center in the field of public health response logistics -- defined as the systematic study of a set of physical and human infrastructures, materials and supplies, transport resources, information and communication systems, business processes, decision support systems, and command and control systems required to respond quickly and appropriately to health crises. The institute pursues this vision through research, education of the nation's next generation of engineers and public health practitioners/researchers, and outreach to key players at the local, regional and national levels.