Integrated Health Alerting And Notification.

This chapter describes the evolution, design and operation of an integrated health alerting and notification system. Although modern information and communication technologies have evolved rapidly in the last decade and significantly improved the technical foundation for health alerting and notification, published literature to communicate lessons learned, best practices, system design, development and operation from real-world experiences is still limited. In this chapter, we outline the functional and technical requirements as well as architecture and components of the New York State (NYS) Integrated Health Alerting and Notification System (IHANS), address issues that affect the effectiveness and timeliness of health alerting, discuss the concept of unified messaging and the current standard alert message distribution framework, and present case studies of health alerting in emergency events and exercises. Experience from development and operation of this system has shown the important role of an integrated health alert system in public health arising from both changes in information and telecommunication technologies and new demands on the public health and healthcare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]