Strengthening and Enhancing the National Health Security Preparedness Index's Measures, Methodologies, and Stakeholder Engagement and Use

The National Health Security Preparedness Index is a unique resource for tracking state and national capabilities that protect people from adverse health consequences caused by disasters, disease outbreaks, and other large-scale hazardous events. Since October 2014, the University of Kentucky has worked with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to expand the content and enhance the methodological rigor and functionality of the Index, and to disseminate and translate the Index broadly for use in improving health and healthcare systems. Because health security is a responsibility shared by many different stakeholders in government and society, the Index combines measures from more than 50 sources and multiple perspectives to offer a broad view of preparedness. We aggregate large volumes of data from national household surveys, medical records, safety inspection results, and surveys of health agencies and facilities in order to produce composite measures of health security for each U.S. state and the nation as a whole each year. The Index reveals strengths as well as vulnerabilities in the protections needed to keep people safe and healthy in the face of disasters, and it tracks how these protections vary across the U.S. and change over time.