The Markle Foundation urged the government and private-sector organizations to prepare for the 2006 hurricane season by putting systems and technologies in place to ensure that medical records and drug histories are accessible during a disaster like Hurricane Katrina, which displaced millions of people last year.

The foundation spearheaded last year’s KatrinaHealth project that cobbled together patient records after the hurricane.

In a related development, the Institute of Medicine plans to release three reports June 14 that are expected to be critical of the country’s emergency medical system and its ability to handle disasters.

The KatrinaHealth project gave authorized users access to evacuees’ medication histories. That information came from a variety of government and commercial sources, including insurers, pharmacy benefit managers and prescription drug databases maintained by companies such as SureScripts, the country’s largest electronic prescribing service.

In a report released today about the lessons learned from the KatrinaHealth project, the Markle Foundation recommended that government health leaders, health care providers, insurers and information technology companies start immediate discussions to determine when and how certain types of medical information can be shared quickly after a disaster.

They should also:

• Create electronic health information systems based on simple Web standards to resolve data format conflicts.


• Agree on a way to authenticate the identities of clinicians, pharmacists and patients using online services to facilitate secure access to private health information.


• Make electronic health information accessible to nurses, nurse practitioners and physician assistants as well as physicians.


• Resolve conflicts in state and federal privacy laws to ensure that they do not hinder medical care delivery after a disaster.