With funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Abt Associates and Geisinger Medical Systems, together with the Web development firm RelyonMedia, created and pilot tested (in an eight-county area of eastern Pennsylvania) a Web-based tool named Emergency Preparedness Resource Inventory—A Tool for Local, Regional, and State Planners (EPRI) for compiling an inventory of healthcare and other emergency resources. Organizations that control these resources can log on to EPRI and enter and update information on their resources. These organizations, as well as emergency response planners and other government officials, can also run a variety of reports from the inventory that provide detailed and summary information on available resources. System administrators can customize EPRI—for example, by specifying what resources are included in the system and what specific reports users can (and cannot) run.
To use EPRI, jurisdictions must download it from the AHRQ Web Site and then install it on a Web server. That is, jurisdictions cannot go to an existing Web Site and start using EPRI immediately.
This manual is a technical description of EPRI and is intended primarily for system administrators charged with installing, customizing, and hosting EPRI. Following this introductory section, the manual contains six sections and an appendix:
In addition to this technical manual, the project produced two other reports: