BALTIMORE — As the country heads into hurricane season, long-term care facilities can take away several key lessons learned from Katrina and its aftermath, Gary Schnerr said at a meeting on long-term care health information technology. “Disaster preparedness, in the broadest of terms, is something that is always with us, and especially for long-term care, where we've been challenged with taking care of probably the most vulnerable segment of our population,” said Mr. Schnerr, director of bioterrorism preparedness at the Health Care Association of New Jersey. While a lot of funding has been put forward by the government to ready the country for a terrorist attack, disaster preparedness needs to be an all-hazards approach, encompassing everything from natural disasters and terrorism to heat waves and heating system failures, he said. When designing a health information technology system, it is important to make sure that the data are portable so that, if necessary, the data can move with facility residents for continuity-of-care purposes, he explained. “Earlier this week, I heard from some of our colleagues down in Florida that post-Katrina, among people evacuated from long-term care facilities, there are over a hundred people who have yet to be identified,” he said at the meeting, which was sponsored by the American Health Information Management Association. “It's a sad commentary. But they obviously went without records and suffer from forms of dementia and other things. We have to eliminate that [situation] in the future,” Mr. Schnerr said. During a disaster or mass-casualty event, long-term care facilities may end up with overflow from hospitals and acute-care medical centers. In such a scenario, not only will the facility need to have medical surge capacity, but the electronic health records system will also need to be able to take on the job of documenting those additional patients. “We saw this again in the Katrina situation—many, many facilities were reluctant to take evacuees, whether they be from the general population or otherwise, because they didn't know how they would be compensated. The government absolutely demands an appropriate set of records be kept,” he said. Another important issue in the discussion of health IT and disaster preparedness is the role that nurses play in the move toward electronic health records. Nurses and nursing organizations say they're ready to embrace the potentially sweeping changes in high-tech health care delivery, but they want to be included in the decisions that are to be made. According to Government Health IT, many nurses say the tendency of hospital managers and government policy makers to “exclude nurses from the design and planning of health information technology means that new health care delivery systems might not be as effective as possible,” especially when it comes to the area of bedside patient care. “There is a lack of understanding in regard to the impact new [health IT] mandates will have on nurses and what nurses can bring to the table. Currently, we don't have a voice in Washington,” said Joyce Sensmeier in an interview with Government Health IT. Ms. Sensmeier is vice president of informatics at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). “Physicians give orders, but nurses are working at the grass-roots level to make it happen. It is critical that we be at the table” in adopting any standards on electronic records or on disaster preparedness, Ms. Sensmeier added. Next Month: Caring for the Ages will feature a 1-year review of how the Gulf Coast hurricanes have affected long-term care in that region. If you are a medical director, administrator, or nurse, and would like to share your experiences, please contact us at [email protected]