I got a fantastic tip from Jason Pomaski at the NACHC conference in Las Vegas back in November. He’s the AVP for Technology at Community Healthcare Network in New York, and he and his team survived the onslaught of Superstorm Sandy not long ago.
One of the things that helped them recover rapidly was registering their voice and data circuits with their telco providers as being high-priority circuits for public health. This is a program run by the Department of Homeland Security, as described here:
Telecommunications Service Priority (TSP)
I haven’t done this myself yet, and being from Alaska, this program may not be available to me because my local telcos may not participate. But you can bet I’m going to dig into this in 2013. We have earthquakes, volcanic fallout, high winds, and ice storms in Anchorage and getting our data circuits restored first in a disaster would allow us to get our public health services running again faster.
This can cover both wired and wireless services. Read up and see if you can get your health center registered. And if you have any experience with the program, hit me up with a comment.
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