CRAFTING A STRATEGIC PLAN BEFORE DISASTER STRIKES
CAN TECHNOLOGY HELP WITH DISASTER PLANNING? By Karen Purze
Senior living executives are reviewing their emergency response plans in the wake of record natural disasters in 2017, and many are turning to technology for help. One critical component of disaster planning is securing business continuity plans; senior living communities are finding that software can help build, as well as practice, those plans.
LiveProcess creates software to plan for and respond to critical, catastrophic, and time-sensitive situations. The software was purpose-built for health care organizations in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Though they have primarily counted public agency and health care providers as customers, they have seen an uptick in interest from senior living communities, partly driven by new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services emergency preparedness requirements. The software allows communities to build, practice, and execute emergency plans as well as coordinate and mobilize teams in real time.
Technology can help, but the most important thing is to have a plan that’s specific to a certain situation and potential hazards—and that your team helped create it. Fred Sievers, senior manager of client services at LiveProcess, is clear: “This isn’t about software intelligence, it’s about leveraging technology to improve and support human intelligence.”
The importance of anticipatory planning and human coordination can’t be de- emphasized when it comes to disasters. “You can answer a few questions and get a compliant plan based on a template, but there’s as much value in the planning process as there is in the plan itself,” said Timothy Manning, a faculty member at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies master's in emergency and disaster management program, and former deputy administrator for protection and national preparedness at the Federal
Emergency Management Administration. “You need to develop the thinking required to respond effectively in a disaster. I’ve never in all my experience heard of anyone pulling a plan off a shelf and flipping through it in an emergency. That’s not how it works.
“If you think about planning for a big scale disaster, and you’re talking about solutions that are bespoke for situations that seem abstract, it can be hard to
motivate [a team to think through the plan],” Manning says. “Instead, think about how to make day-to-day business operations more efficient. Because if you’re more efficient, your business is more resilient and more likely to survive a disaster, whether that’s a big storm surge or the random power cut that’s going to happen three days from now.”
Using LiveProcess, organizations can build exercises to mimic events and test their response to an emergency. 16 SENIOR LIVING EXECUTIVE JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2018
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