Partner Profile

National Safety Council's Emergency Alert Network

Each year, the public faces potential health threats, from pandemic influenza, to hurricanes, to bioterrorism. During times like these, CDC understands the importance of disseminating public health messages in a timely manner. With the implementation of new emergency communication tools such as the Emergency Alert Network (EAN), CDC seeks to continue advancing its ability to connect quickly and effectively with its partners and the public.

NCHM's Division of Partnerships and Strategic Alliances (DPSA) collaborated with the National Safety Council* (NSC) to create EAN, an e-mail- and voice-messaging system built on the Send Word Now* platform and funded through DPSA's business cooperative agreement with NSC.

The Emergency Alert Network

In the event of a public health emergency, EAN has the capacity to reach over 17,000 businesses and 8 million employees and their dependents with CDC-cleared information. The EAN database contains all critical infrastructure sectors including agriculture, forestry and fishing, manufacturing, large- and small-retail establishments, schools, healthcare, banking and insurance. The NSC database will also be expanding to include coalition representatives of the National Business Coalition on Health* (NBCH), another CDC business cooperative agreement grantee, which represents 10,000 employers and 25 million employees and their dependents.

During emergencies, businesses are a key component of the partnership strategy and help reach a wide audience, including their employees, employees' dependents and other business partners. By accessing NSC's and NBCH's memberships, CDC can efficiently and effectively provide emergency health information to a broad business base.

"During emergencies, it's important for CDC to partner with a variety of organizations and institutions, such as businesses, to disseminate emergent health information and resources to protect the public's health," said Marsha Vanderford, director of CDC's Emergency Communication System (ECS).

EAN Activated for Hurricane Ike

ECS was activated during Hurricane Ike to lead CDC's communication response activities, including the distribution of health protection information to the public and stakeholders before, during and after the hurricane. The Partners' Desk, which consists of a team of staff whose primary role is to disseminate and coordinate CDC's public health emergency messages between CDC and external private and public partners, reached out to NSC to discuss using EAN to disseminate health protection messages to EAN's members. NSC agreed that the emergency situation presented an ideal opportunity to deliver important public health information.

Since a number of deaths had occurred from carbon monoxide poisoning, two messages were developed that focused on providing appropriate methods to use generators and other such devices.

The first message was a test message to all EAN members. Prior to the hurricane, they were informed that EAN would be tested to assess whether the correct processes were in place to disseminate a message and receive responses back from the EAN membership. Exactly 17,993 businesses received the test message, which advised proper generator use to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning.

To contact these 17,993 members, about 34,805 contact points were used (19,551 phone calls and 15,254 e-mail and text messages). EAN's notification technology allowed contacts in the database to prioritize (cascade) the order in which calls were placed; in addition, the cascade feature stopped calling a contact once a call was answered. Out of the 17,993 business members, 96 percent were successfully contacted either by telephone or e-mail. Furthermore, 4,815 members replied with a "1" to confirm receipt of the test message. After sending the test message, NSC conducted an electronic survey with all EAN participants. The majority of respondents agreed that EAN was a useful communication tool in preparing for and staying informed during public health emergencies and wanted to remain members of EAN. About 62 percent experienced no problems in receiving the test message.

One participant commented that, "The network and the information is a valuable asset to my organization. It can be used to safeguard our employees, clients, customers and associates in times of emergencies."

Additionally, members of the insurance industry engaged in conversations with CDC and NSC to determine how effective they would be in distributing information. The members were confident that their field representatives would be in an ideal position to distribute information on carbon monoxide poisoning and discuss how to prevent it as they checked customers' homes for damage. Based on this information, a second message was sent to 431 companies in the insurance industry via e-mail and text message.

Wendy Heaps, DPSA business sector liaison to NSC, said, "EAN is an efficient tool that provides timely, relevant and action-oriented information to a broad base of businesses and, ultimately, increases CDC's ability to help reduce injuries, prevent disease and save lives."

Preparing for Future Emergencies

Many lessons were learned during the process of activating EAN for Hurricane Ike, such as the need for pre-event message bundling, segmenting messages to different sectors, understanding the limitations of the communication channels and ensuring message recipients are educated on the message-response feature. CDC and NSC will continue to develop EAN's capabilities and increase its database to include an even wider base of businesses.