The Virginia Hospital and Health Care Association’s (VHHA) Emergency Operation Center (EOC) is a pivotal tool of its Virginia-wide Hospital Alerting and Status System (VHASS). VHASS was created to enhance the distribution of critical emergency management information needed by Virginia hospitals and healthcare providers. Likewise, the system is designed to provide Virginia residents with superior interoperability of communication and response efforts during a time of crisis.
SiteVision, who has closely assisted in the development of the network centric parent site (VHASS), will be responsible for providing project management, scope, module specific programming and development, QA and Testing, as well as final deployment and testing.
VHASS and, respectively, the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) is a completely web browser based application to allow Virginia members to maintain and update emergency status information in real time and as required. The system is a statewide cooperative effort that includes Virginia hospital members, the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) and the Virginia Department of Emergency Management.
A recent addition to the WebEOC was a separate MedEvac WeatherSAFE module created to let emergency air transport organizations share and inform each other of flight and dangerous weather hazards in their daily operations in real time.
With the scheduled enhancements The MedEvac WeatherSAFE module will have a new status board to receive emergency alerting messages transmitted by the Emergency Operations Center and permit transport members access to the main WebEOC Board. Air transport organizations will update their helicopter availability status and other information while VHHA users may monitor the status board and make contact with an air transport organization if needed during an incident. Importantly, the new status board enables VHHA hospital and healthcare members and Air Transport Operators to effectively interact during critical mass emergency incidents.
In addition, hospital members will now be able to enter Hospital Landing Zone information that includes landing imagery, potential site hazards and the like. This information will be accessible by the MedEvac WeatherSAFE members to assess hospital landing sites as required.
In total, the new VHHA enhancements will further improve an already impressive alerting and status system utilized by Hospitals, Healthcare providers and Emergency Response members throughout Virginia.