From Katrina to Wildfires Leveraging Technology in Disaster Response

Healthcare planners can learn more about how incorporating electronic health records (EHR) and other lessons learned from recent disasters bolstered the medical responses to Hurricane Harvey and the California wildfires. The authors share lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina (particularly from the Veteran’s Administration, which used EHR at the time); describe the role of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act; and share how tools such as EmPOWER serve vulnerable populations before, during, and after disasters.