How to start communicating with other hospitals under EM.02.02.01
When it comes to emergency communication under Joint Commission standard EM.02.02.01, an important piece to consider is how you communicate with other healthcare organizations in the contiguous geographic area.
So, the first step is to identify the constituents of each organization (I’m thinking that that should be a fairly straightforward undertaking). Then, I think the thing to do is to create an incident command fact sheet to include:
- The essential elements of your command structure, including names, roles, and phone numbers. You will want to identify some sort of recurring frequency for reviewing the accuracy of the information provided, ideally in conjunction with the partners. One good thing about being ahead of the curve on this is if your partners haven’t thought much about how they’d actually do this, you can kind of dictate how the process works.
- The essential elements of your command center for emergency response (i.e., current or updated information to your partners, based on the information you’ve already provided in the first bullet) in the event there is an emergency. This is information you’d want to share with your partners early on in the process, and update as events evolve.
- Shareable resources and assets. This is best set up as both a proactive and reactive activity, letting everyone know what you could share ahead of time and then resharing this info during the response phase of an emergency.
About the Author: Steve MacArthur is a consultant for The Greeley Company, a division of HCPro. He brings 30 years of healthcare management and consulting experience to his work with hospitals, physician offices, and ambulatory care facilities across the country. He is the author of HCPro's Hospital Safety Director's Handbook and is contributing editor for Briefings on Hospital Safety. Contact Steve at 
Ruth Schaefer | Apr 23, 2009 | Reply
Steve,
As a clinical laboratory with four sites that interface with area hospitals and physicians, we have done (pretty well I think) your first two suggestions. Discussing ahead of time shareable resources was the most valuable to us. There were serious discussions about what to share – how much – to what extent – do we stockpile – do our patients come first or are people in need people in need. It actuially drew us closer together as a working team preparing for what we all hope doesn’t happen. I encourage others to take this step. -Ruth
Debbie | Apr 23, 2009 | Reply
In Louisiana, our hospitals are broken down into Regions. We are in the Northwest corner in Region 7. We have a wonderful relationship with the other emergency management teams in all of the hospitals in our Region. We meet on a regular basis, plan our community-wide drill together AND even purchase some of the same equipment with our Federal grants so that no matter which facility your are in, you are familiar with the equipment. Louisiana has also adopted a set of emergency codes and all of the hospitals in Region 7 use these codes. This also helps people like agency nurses that work at various hospitals in the Region