Following the events of September 11th and the anthrax attacks of October 2001, Fairfax County Emergency Management officials realized the need to strengthen the County’s capability to respond to a bio-terror event or an infectious disease outbreak. With avian flu making headlines around the world, the need for rapid response to a public health crisis has been reinforced. Working with community physicians, the Fairfax County Health Department began recruiting volunteers soon after the fall of 2001, and created an initial medical volunteer corps to respond to these types of incidents. In 2003 this group became officially affiliated with the Medical Reserve Corps, a program of the federal Citizens Corps. The Fairfax Medical Reserve Corps, serving Fairfax County, Fairfax City and Falls Church, is now one of the largest Medical Reserve Corps in the country.

Fairfax County, VA is part of the National Capital Region, located just outside of Washington, D.C. Fairfax has the largest population of residents by county in the state. A worse case health scenario would require the vaccination 1.2 million residents in 3 to 5 days. This means that dispensing sites would need to be up and running quickly, with full staffs of doctors, nurses, psychologists, administrative and logistics staff, and a number of other trained health volunteers.

The Fairfax MRC provides a base of trained, and active volunteers that could respond immediately to a bio-event, and dispense large quantities of vaccine rapidly. The Fairfax County’s MRC program is run by a staff of five public health employees from the county, and has a base of 3,500 Medical Reserve Corps volunteers. With the goal of growing the volunteer base to 13,000, the Fairfax Medical Reserve Corps needed a way to enroll, deploy, assign, and communicate with volunteers. They also needed a system that could be used to ensure that volunteers had the latest up-to-date training, and verify the identity of a volunteer on a moment’s notice.

Health originally purchased the Roam Secure Alert Network (RSANTM) system using Health and Human Services (HHS) grant funding. Fairfax MRC made the best use of their emergency text alerting and notification system, but expressed the need to develop a dynamic system that would help manage:

• The volunteer application process
  
• Automated team assignments
  
• Teams by volunteer leaders
  
• Information about volunteer training
  
• Resources
  
• Alerting by area or region
  
• Rapid creation of ID badges

• Facilitate recruitment and assign roles to new volunteers
  
• Pre-qualify volunteers
  
• Optimally assign roles to new volunteers automatically
  
• Enable volunteers to manage their account information
  
• Track alerts and volunteer responses
  
• Send alerts remotely via any Web enabled device
  
• Manage response teams
  
• Create ad hoc groups on a moment’s notice
  
• Manage training information
  
• Rapidly distribute health alerts and notifications via e-mail and wireless devices, such as cell phone, pager, BlackBerry, Treo, PDA, etc.
  
• Send alerts to volunteers based on their geographic location
  
• Send updates, reminders and HTML rich text newsletters to volunteers and attach files with images
  
• Manage shifts, teams and resources at dispensing sites; create and print temporary ID cards for volunteers and mobilize additional volunteers as needed
  
• Enroll non-English speaking volunteers