Date:  July 21, 2010

The National Institute for Hometown Security exhibited at the NACCHO Annual Meeting on July 13-16, 2010 at the Memphis Convention Center in Memphis Tennessee. The National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) is the national organization representing local health departments. NACCHO supports efforts that protect and improve the health of all people and all communities by promoting national policy, developing resources and programs, seeking health equity, and supporting effective local public health practice and systems.

NACCHO is governed by a 27-member Board of Directors, comprising health officials from around the country elected by their peers, and including ex officio members representing the National Association of Counties, of which NACCHO is an affiliate, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

NIHS featured the Pandemic Preparedness Project, which is led by the University of Louisville. Dr. Paul McKinney is leading an effort to provide operation plans if a pandemic were to occur in the foreseeable future. This program is focused on helping communities prepare and respond to pandemics. Areas of emphasis are detection, preparedness, protection, response and recovery.  

Other projects that was featured at the NACCHO conference was the Incident Management Decision Support System (IMDSS-H™)  Dr. Jim Gantt with Murray State University is working on a health care extension to the Incident Management Decision Support System (IMDSS) which is under development on a different contract.  IMDSS-H™ will add the functionality required to collect, process, and visualize public health information and use this information to aid in planning an effective response to potential medical and public health emergencies.  The system will include medical resource allocation models.  

The Real Time Decision Support System for Health Care and Public Health Sector Protection project was also showcased at the conference.  Dr. Sunderesh Heragu has formed a project team comprising experts in logistics, operations research, health care delivery, and emergency response.  This team will develop a real time decision support system to meet the needs of the HPH sector.  This work will start with development of a systems requirements document to guide the development. Then methods of secure information exchange for medical surge capacity management will be developed.  Finally, the team will work with medical care providers to evaluate the impact of the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), as outlined by CDC, OSHA, and IOM, on the ability of the healthcare workforce to comply and thereby protect themselves.

In the photo below, Holly Hurd-NIHS and Elvis at the NIHS booth

In the 2 photos below: the Exhibit Hall at the NACCHO Conference at the Memphis Convention Center