The Georgia Power Corporation (GPC) provides power to 155 (97.5%) of the 159 counties in Georgia (GA), and employs 9,600 people throughout the state. GPC is engaged in preparing for pandemic influenza, and committed to protecting the critical infrastructure and ensuring its continuity of operations. The GPC employee “Crisis Absence Reporting Tool” (CART) was designed to provide the Georgia Syndromic
Surveillance (GA SS) Program with employee absentee/ reason to inform Public Health and GPC leadership about health events occurring in their employees statewide.
The GA SS Program has been implemented in 13 (72%) of the 18 Health Districts. In each of these locations, data are transferred from an ED, ambulatory care center, or school district to the Georgia Division of Public Health (GDPH) for analysis and dissemination of results to all stakeholders. GDPH wanted to collaborate with a large corporation with a statewide employee base to conduct absentee and reason for absence SS to provide an additional perspective to the existing data streams used by GA SS.
In GA, the LHD are responsible for organizing pandemic planning committees comprised of community partners to discuss continuity of basic services and maintenance of the critical infrastructure at the local level during an influenza pandemic. Increasing SS capacity is an important component of Local Health District (LHD) pandemic planning strategies in GA.
Objective
To create a non-traditional partnership between the GPC and the GDPH to aid in adverse health event detection and response activities during an influenza pandemic or other health emergency. This will include augmenting CART with SS data from the GA SS Program. These data will be analyzed by GA SS and results disseminated to LHDs, who monitor and respond to SS data in their jurisdictions. Analyses will also be provided to GPC to aid in resource allocation to ensure the continuity of services in GA during emergencies.