Disaster Preparedness

Disaster Preparedness and Response Project

There are lessons learned from our nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic that may be utilized to strengthen America’s readiness and response to future public health crises. Preceding the COVID-19 pandemic, the Healthcare Leadership Council (HLC), comprised of leading companies and organizations from virtually all health sectors, began analyzing how to improve the healthcare response to all disasters. Amid COVID-19, HLC has expanded its work and launched an initiative through its National Dialogue for Healthcare Innovation platform, partnering with Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, led by Mark McClellan, M.D., Ph.D., to convene experts from government, industry, non-profit organizations and associations to develop recommendations to optimize public-private capabilities and strategies for developing systemic changes that will address future national crises.

Three workstreams met monthly for a portion of 2020 leading up to the virtual summit meeting that took place on October 29, 2020. The objective of the summit was to reach a consensus on disaster readiness and response recommendations to be released in early 2021. The concurrent workstreams evaluated potential preparedness, response capabilities and opportunities for improvement.

Workstream 1: Innovation

Focused on vaccines, testing and supply chain readiness.

Workstream 2: Data and Evidence Generation

Focused on accurate, real-time data to support clinical and remote patient care, public health surveillance and biomedical innovation.

Workstream 3: Care Delivery

Focused on how to bolter care delivery. Examples include: through telemedicine, payment innovation and workforce resiliency.

The NDHI disaster preparedness and response steering committee are chaired by Calvin Schmidt, Johnson & Johnson, and consists of healthcare executives, including the workstream co-chairs, from multiple industry sectors.