ABOUT US

Regional Disaster Health Response System (RDHRS)

The RDHRS is a tiered system that builds upon and unifies existing assets within states and across regions to support a more coherent, comprehensive, and capable health care disaster response system. The RDHRS integrates clinical and health care systems’ operational expertise into existing preparedness and response structures at the local, state, and regional level, and expands capabilities and capacity for improving disaster readiness across the health care system, increasing medical surge capacity, and providing specialty care – including trauma, burn and infectious disease, among others – during large-scale disasters or public health emergencies. RDHRS sites build on existing medical surge and disaster preparedness foundations across industry and government, fostering and maturing multi-state partnerships as well as industry assets to create an integrated, tiered system of disaster health care.

The primary objectives of the RDHRS are to:

Improve bidirectional communication and situational awareness of the medical needs and issues of the response between health care organizations and local, state, regional, and federal partners;
Leverage, build, or augment the highly specialized clinical capabilities critical to unusual hazards or catastrophic events; and
Augment the horizontal (whole of community) integration of key stakeholders that comprise health care coalitions with readily accessible clinical capabilities that are largely missing from the current configuration of such coalitions.

RDHRS OBJECTIVES

OUR MISSION

To provide healthcare leadership, knowledge, expertise, and support in disaster response for our communities in Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah. We will build partnerships and networks that strengthen disaster preparedness, information sharing, and response capabilities for the healthcare needs of today and tomorrow.

To become a multidisciplinary team of leaders and experts in disaster response, offering interoperable services, products, and systems to improve healthcare security and instill confidence and trust in the communities we serve.

OUR VISION

Team Members

Executive Leadership

Principal Investigator

Chief Medical Officer, Denver Health and Hospital Authority and Professor of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases, University of Colorado School of Medicine

MPRDHRS Medical Director

Medical Director of Emergency Preparedness, University of Colorado Hospital, Professor of Emergency Medicine, Colorado School of Public Health, University of Colorado School of Medicine