The Philadelphia Department of Public Health purchased RSAN using grant money from the Centers for Disease Control to promote state, regional, and local preparedness for health related emergencies.
PDPH will have a secure, centralized, redundant, Web-accessible contact database of thousands of public health officials who can be easily managed, grouped, and alerted in seconds. Alerts will be sent for routine, urgent, and emergency communications for the department as well as to other partner agencies in the city.
The Philadelphia HRAN will also be expanded in the months ahead to actively manage the Philadelphia Medical Reserve Corps Volunteer program. RSAN health solution features that support the management and recruitment of Medical Reserve Corp volunteers include:
- Online recruitment of volunteers and self-management of existing volunteer contact information and credentials
- Allocating human resources across dispensing sites
- Tracking and managing key information about volunteer credentials and licensing
- Distributing e-newsletters to active volunteers
- Delivering training notification and tracking for medical reserve corps volunteers.
In the event of a disease outbreak such as the avian flu or a bio-terrorism incident, the HRAN system could be activated in seconds and provide Philadelphia Health Officials real-time, two-way text-based communication with volunteers on the medical reserve corps teams, as well as other key officials throughout the city. Alerts can be sent to cell phones, e-mail, Blackberry/Treo/PDAs, and pagers. Alerts can also be initiated remotely and can include attachments with additional instructions telling volunteers where they are deployed in the case of an emergency.
