Johns Hopkins CEPAR Kicks into Action During ‘Shadow Bowl’ Event

The Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR) was among several organizations participating in “Shadow Bowl” — a series of simulated mass casualty disasters in the San Diego region and other communities around the nation during Super Bowl weekend (Jan. 24-26).

Organized by MindTel LLC, Syracuse, N.Y., Shadow Bowl involved decision-makers, health care providers, emergency services and technologists in events designed to demonstrate their readiness and ability to respond effectively to a mass casualty event. Johns Hopkins joined in the action through CEPAR — a collaborative effort between Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore and The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md.

CEPAR integrates the capabilities of three Hopkins hospitals; 23 off-site medical clinics throughout Maryland; medical, public health and nursing schools; and the systems engineering expertise of APL to respond to widespread disasters, whether caused by nature or terrorist activities.

CEPAR activities were kicked off by a message from Shadow Bowl officials that a (simulated) attack on FedEx Field just outside Washington had left approximately 45,000 people injured and that Hopkins hospitals and clinics had to accommodate 500 or more of them.

“We passed the word on to the Hopkins facilities and kept the Shadow Bowl Incident Command informed on how well they were handling the surge of patients,” says Chris Latimer, who heads APL’s CEPAR team. “As these units simulated the discharging of patients, canceling elective procedures, transferring patients to alternate sites, adding staff and using other strategies to accommodate the incoming patients, we were be able to review our mass casualty emergency procedures and evaluate what we need to improve.”

“Shadow Bowl provided a unique opportunity to develop and exercise arrays of communications assets, sensor networks, and online capabilities with scaleable connectivity to national medical emergency resources,” says Dr. Dave Warner, Director of Medical Intelligence for MindTel. “We believe every participant benefited — not only in increasing their ability to cope with mass casualty events - but also in creating more efficient process flow, patient safety and cost effectiveness in their day-to-day health care settings.”