HHS emPOWER Program (emPOWER) has officially launched the HHS emPOWER Program Platform, a new mobile-ready technical assistance platform that provides public health, health care, and emergency management organizations, first responders, power companies, and many other partners with emPOWER data, tools, training, and informational resources to help them anticipate, plan for, and respond to incidents, emergencies, and disasters in their communities. 

The Platform was developed in response to partner requests and provides readily meaningful, consumable, and actionable information and resources in a centralized location. Anyone can now rapidly access, adopt, download, and operationalize emPOWER tools, resources, and HHS emPOWER Map de-identified data to help protect the health of electricity- and health care-dependent at-risk populations living independently in communities across our nation. Partners can learn about the history of emPOWER on the About page and rapidly access the Platform’s Resources page to find new fact sheets, job aids, quick reference resources, and more tools that have been and will continue to be developed with their unique needs in mind. Partners can also discover how rural-to-urban communities across the nation have used emPOWER tools to enhance their health care situational awareness, coordinate planning activities across community partners, and innovatively conduct life-saving outreach activities using the emPOWER in Action interactive map and by reviewing detailed Stories from the Field.

The Program has also re-launched an improved, mobile-ready HHS emPOWER Map that can be found at a new website address, https://empowerprogram.hhs.gov/empowermap. Based on partner feedback, emPOWER updated the Map to include new capabilities that enable users to download data and perform advanced cross-jurisdictional data aggregations. The Platform also features an informational HHS emPOWER Map page with historical HHS emPOWER Map datasets to support those seeking to perform analyses to better understand historical trends in electricity-dependent population density by geography in their community.

In addition to launching the Platform and new HHS emPOWER Map, emPOWER has released new and enhanced versions of emPOWER tools. The enhanced HHS emPOWER Representational State Transfer (REST) Service_Public enables users to readily access and apply the map data layer to their own geographic information system (GIS) application to support national, state, territory, local, and community-based GIS analyses. The award-winning, artificial intelligence (AI) tool, emPOWER AI puts the HHS emPOWER Map data right in the palm of the user’s hand, leveraging Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa to help enhance the user’s situational awareness of electricity-dependent populations. In addition, emPOWER has expanded its emPOWERing State/Territorial Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) Data Pilot to advance states’ and territories’ understanding of pediatric and other adult at-risk populations in their communities. To help users better understand how to implement these tools effectively, we have released a comprehensive web-based training and created a robust suite of informational resources.

The new HHS emPOWER Platform is advancing the Program’s commitment to providing the right data, in the right tool, to the right person, at the right time. Leveraging the data, tools, and resources on the Platform will help federal to community partners in most critical infrastructure sectors, support, and advance emergency preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation activities to protect the health and meet the needs of at-risk individuals in their communities. To learn more, please visit the new HHS emPOWER Program Platform or check out the HHS emPOWER Program Platform Fact Sheet