Hartford HealthCare Disaster Exercise

Hartford HealthCare (HHC) is a fully integrated health system with almost 20,000 employees and comprised of 9 hospitals, including a trauma center and behavioral health entities, senior living communities, multi-specialty medical group, and a regional home care system. They wanted to test their ability to surge beyond their licensed bed capacity if their system or the region was hit by a disaster. Not every facility is affected by a disaster in the same way, but they would need to work together to coordinate across multiple locations.

Our team developed and conducted an integrated, full-scale system-wide disaster exercise, testing the procedures at each of the 15 entities while centrally coordinating from a system Emergency Operations Center. Each site set up a command center and tested their ability to manage space, resources, and staffing through the simulated event. This exercise strengthened their collaboration skills, while allowing HHC to capitalize on their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses. This is especially challenging while caring for special care patients such as critical care and behavioral health units to ensure they are better prepared when a real disaster strikes.