Bioterror Attack Drill Tests Communications Technology

Chicago-area hospitals this week are conducting a dress rehearsal to test their preparedness for dealing with a bioterrorist attack.

The participation of 60 hospitals is part of a larger week-long exercise dubbed TopOff2, which is also being conducted in Seattle and is supported by the Homeland Security and State departments to sample test how well U.S. cities might respond to real terrorist attacks.

Rush-Copley Medical Center, a 150-bed community hospital in Aurora, Ill., 45 miles west of Chicago, had 56 mock patients show up over a 24-hour period complaining of flulike symptoms that, unknown to the patients, are the result of a pretend attack of pneumonic plague.

"We know the patients are actors because they come into the ER dressed in yellow T-shirts, but they are really doing a good job in playing their roles--coughing, some pretending to be very sick," a Rush-Copley spokeswoman says. The patients are processed at the hospital as though they are real. While doctors aren't actually treating the patients, information about symptoms is gathered.

The TopOff drill has Rush-Copley Medical Center functioning this week in Code Triage, the course of action the hospital actually takes whenever there's a real crisis, such as serious multicar accidents that result in mass injuries.

During the TopOff drill, Rush-Copley also is using communication technology that plays a critical role in real Code Triage situations. Tops on the list of IT being used is EnvoyXpress, a Web-based tool from EnvoyWorldWide Inc. Rush-Copley uses EnvoyXpress to quickly notify all 1,130 of its employees that the hospital is under Code Triage and that they should report to work.

"With four clicks of a mouse, all our employees are reached in two minutes," Rush-Copley manager of information services Jim Berryhill says. Before deploying EnvoyXpress seven months ago, Rush-Copley telephone operators had to manually call each employee, a process that could take hours--particularly during an overnight crisis, when there's only one operator on duty, he says.

EnvoyXpress taps into Rush-Copley's database of all employees' home, cell, and pager phone numbers and leaves recorded voice or text messages instructing the employees about what to do. Employees let the hospital know whether they can report to work by hitting Nos. 1 or 2 on their phone keypads.

EnvoyXpress gives Rush-Copley an immediate tally of how many employees will be reporting and who they are so hospital managers can properly plan staffing in needed departments, Berryhill says.

It costs Rush-Copley 15 cents per EnvoyXpress call, per employee. When there's no emergency, the hospital can also use the tool for more isolated problems, such as reaching all maintenance workers in case of a leaky roof.