Table 3. Top 10 things your health care IT organization can do now.

These are the top 10 actions you can take now to help your organization prepare for COVID-19 or future infectious disease emergency scenarios.

1. Establish your new or evaluate your existing IT response structure. Be sure that points of contact and processes will work for this situation. Plan for the long haul. You will need IT services to surge support for weeks or months. Ensure you have a deep bench of experts in key areas to sustain the demand.

2. All updates to your EHR must be evaluated and centrally disseminated as quickly as possible. Your IT personnel must be able to do this around the clock. Ensure that your information security team has a rapid process to assess, document, and approve risk decisions and exceptions during the emergency.

3. Quickly prepare multiple sites with telehealth capability. This will allow patients and practitioners to flow between different sites. Begin training your practitioners immediately.

4. Assess remote user capability, licenses, software, hardware and bandwidth limitations to connect to your internal systems to ensure your systems can handle the influx of users and increased utilization of your network and resources.

5. Assess how your organization can be nimble with granting access to systems and sites in emergencies. Start planning now for emergency-level access that allows people to surge and flow between sites.

6. Make patient screening tools accessible prior to presenting. Priority needs to be on ensuring your patients know how to self-screen.

7. Establish a centralized intranet site for disaster management and communication. This includes an incident command dashboard of automated metrics to help assess the evolving situation.

8. Identify the role of IT in sending communication to the workforce. Test dissemination methods to ensure they reach your entire workforce. Review communication distribution lists to ensure that they accurately reflect the internal, external, partner, and other groups that are critical to your response.

9. Prepare for increased help desk support requirements, and ensure your staff are prepared to answer questions. Quickly resolve issues with clinicians using new telehealth capabilities and newly teleworking employees.

10. Plan for large scale remote work. This will require workforce provisioning of equipment and policies and procedures for managing a remote workforce.

Abbreviations: EHR, electronic health record; IT, information technology.