The view from inside major medical centers
KELLY: Now that the secretary is gone, let me ask you a question. I'll throw this out to the panel. How are the feds doing? Are they meeting their end of the bargain on this in terms of coordination, in terms of – well, we know about money – what are they not doing – rate them and then what do they need to be doing next if you were running Mr. Leavitt's department?
MILLER: Well, let me tackle that. First, we and about 18 other institutions, academic healthcare centers across the country are – have an $18-million grant to try to set up the lines of communication across all of the centers from the north to the south, the east to the west, trying to get best practices. And so there are federal dollars that are starting to flow into institutions to help put in the infrastructure for communication, just the communication piece. And so I would say we are about 50 percent of the way there. We are getting support from Michael Chertoff and his department in this area. But some of the other issues, the ones that we have talked about already, have not been addressed at all.
BURKE: I would say we've also been the beneficiaries of federal dollars related to flood-mitigation projects. We now have hardened our infrastructure to try to support it through mostly storm scenarios but also it applies to other emergency situations. We've also received some state support for bio-terrorism preparation and other equipment and facilities needs that we've had to put forward.
What wasn't mentioned was the amount of revenue lost that you sustained during one of these events that I'd point out for our own institution. We estimate that we had a revenue loss of about $20 million during the Hurricane Rita scenario in which the storm didn't even strike our city; that we shut down our operations for four days. We lost the revenues associated with those four days of operations, and we paid overtime to all of our employee ride-out team member who stayed through that period. So we started out with that revenue loss just preparing for the scenario and it's difficult to sustain that for an extended period of time.
KELLY: Yeah, well –
KAHN: Maybe one brief comment from my perspective about this issue is that I think it's very important that we look at all the types of emergency preparedness that need to be considered at the same time. It isn't just the pandemic, it isn't just a natural disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane; it could be a manmade accident – either intentional or unintentional. It could be a variety of different factors and, I think, as we evaluate how we're doing as a medical society and as a government and as other agencies, we have to say – we have to separate how prepared are we for individual types of events versus those things which cut across all events, which certainly should be our first level of preparedness. We want to try to be sure we cover those basic needs that will occur no matter what the problem is, and then add on top of that, those things that are special to the kind of events that might be epidemic related or pandemic related versus those that might be natural disaster related, which would be quite different.
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