Local Health Department Evaluation of Flu on Call™: Leveraging the Whole Community to Improve Pandemic Preparedness

BACKGROUND: Local public health agencies are at the forefront of coordinating community preparedness efforts for infectious disease outbreaks. This includes organizing resources, leveraging infrastructure, and evaluating systems to assure a cost-effective and sustained response and recovery to declared public health emergencies including an influenza pandemic. With this understanding, City of Milwaukee Health Department (MHD) was selected as one of two national pilot sites to test Flu on Call™, a new influenza preparedness capability. To ensure that this system would be ready for a future emergency, Flu on Call™ was tested between January and February 2016, as part of seasonal flu response in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. This pilot project provided MHD with the opportunity to evaluate the communication strategies used to promote Flu on Call™, in relation to the areas of Milwaukee County with the highest uptake of Flu on Call™. METHODS: Various Milwaukee County media outlets were utilized to promote public awareness of the pilot project. Each media outlet has specific metrics used to report descriptive statistics on market penetration and audience demographics. This includes the number of impressions for bus shelter posters, billboards and movie theater advertisements, Facebook analytics for social media posts, and listener demographics for radio spots. These metrics were compared graphically and geographically using Arc-GIS. RESULTS: The outcome of the pilot identified the most effective media outlets for uptake of Flu on Call™usability. The pilot also required significant cross-disciplinary pre-planning and engagement with a wide array of local community partners to minimize conflict with existing public and private healthcare response systems and established protocols, while simultaneously maximizing available Whole of Community partner expertise and resources. CONCLUSIONS: As expected, some media outlets were more effective at increasing public awareness and uptake of Flu on Call™ than others. Regardless, Flu on Call™ holds promise as a viable tool for local public health agencies to enhance regional response and recovery to pandemic influenza, to better manage healthcare capacity, and to augment disease surveillance.