Epidemiology & Public Health

Background: Hurricanes Irma and Maria affected the US Territory of Puerto Rico in 2017 causing catastrophic impacts and damages to key facilities and services. As part of the overall public health response activities, a Public Health Branch (PHB), operating under the Department of Health and Human Services Incident Response Coordination Team, conducted environmental assessments of health care facilities throughout Puerto Rico using standardized Infrastructure Capacity Assessment Tools (ICAT).

Methods: After determining a redundancy of efforts and the significant amount of time required for data entry, data cleaning, and analysis and reporting of key findings, the PHB, in collaboration with the Puerto Rico Planning Board’s GIS group, developed an app-based survey, including information on operational status and structural damage. The Field Assessment

Teams piloted the ICAT app from October 31, 2017 to November 18, 2017 in 76 clinics. Additionally, the development team created a dashboard allowing real-time field data to be viewed by response leadership.

Results: The pilot work indicates the ICAT app saved a minimum of 1 hour per survey (minimum of 72 hours per week) that was previously required for data entry and data cleaning and reduced the errors encountered during translation of paper survey information into the electronic database.

Conclusions: GIS capabilities of the app were deemed extremely relevant and important in multi-agency emergency response settings allowing partners visibility on daily assessment activities. The ICAT app piloted during the Hurricane Maria response demonstrated the feasibility of this tool during disaster response activities. Currently, the ICAT app is being expanded to a

broader set of assessment tools, the Comprehensive Disaster Assessment and Readiness Tools (CDART), which will allow for decrease redundancy/duplication of efforts, decrease respondent fatigue, and increase efficiency and data quality while allowing for real-time presentation of key information to response leadership during the disaster response phase.