Clark County Public Health has stepped into the 21st century when it comes to alerting residents of potential disease outbreaks.
The county has partnered with Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency (CRESA) to use the call center’s community notification system during public health emergencies.
The partnership has the potential to save the county thousands of dollars and hours of staff time during disease outbreaks, said Richard Konrad, program coordinator for the county’s emergency preparedness program.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to do our work more efficiently,” said John Wiesman, director of Clark County Public Health.
The county and CRESA formed an agreement following two measles cases in Clark County earlier this year.
Public health staff members worked overtime to call and interview 497 people who may have come into contact with the sick children. That meant long hours for public health workers, with other staffers pulled from their positions to help man the call center, Konrad said.
The effort cost the county $4,125 in staff time and overtime, he said.
“This (CRESA) system would have eliminated the need to make personal calls to that large number of people,” Konrad said.
The CRESA system will allow public health officials to record a message with up to five questions. The system can then call a selected group of people — in the measles case, the 497 potentially exposed people — to respond to the survey questions by using their phone keypad.
The data from the calls is immediately sent back to health officials, who can analyze the results and follow up personally, if needed.
After a long day working at the measles call center, Lianne Martinez, program coordinator of the county’s emergency preparedness program, came up with the idea of using the CRESA system and pursued the partnership.
Had the system been used during the measles episodes, it would have cost the county $80 as opposed to $4,125, Martinez said.
CRESA’s notification system infrastructure has already been paid for with regional homeland security grant funds. The cost for administering each call is about 20 cents per minute, said Cheryl Bledsoe, CRESA division manager.
The system can make a maximum of 6,000 calls per minute but is typically set to make 1,000 calls per minute in order to avoid overloading phone carriers’ systems, Bledsoe said.
In addition to making the calls, the system has the capability of calling back phones that go unanswered, offering an option to speak to a health official directly and providing a call-back number. The system tracks how each caller responded and compiles the answers in various charts, graphs and tables that make analyzing the data easier for health staff, Martinez said.
Last month, Clark County Public Health had the opportunity to test the system.
On Nov. 3 and Nov. 4, Truman Elementary School reported an absentee rate of more than 10 percent. Health officials decided to investigate the cause of the absences using the community notification system.
The school faxed a list of phone numbers for absent students. Health officials created a message for parents with questions about the cause of their child’s absence and symptoms of illness. Within 30 minutes, the health department was able to determine the students had a virus rather than a more serious illness, Martinez said.
The total cost for administering the call to 55 homes was $7.70, she said.
Marissa Harshman: http://twitter.com/col_health; http://facebook.com/reporterharshman; marissa.harshman@columbian.com; 360-735-4546.
