The effective design of critical incident planning and procedures allows emergency managers to leverage critical thinking to understand, adapt, and solve problems in a constantly changing environment, which occur with each unique event. This requires organizations to implement effective processes and leverage technological solutions to ensure they can maintain complete situational awareness to keep their communities safe, mitigate risks, limit liability, and prepare for future critical incidents. As with any black swan event, the recent disruption across all industries due to the coronavirus has had an enormous collective impact. For emergency managers, the current pandemic has created the need to address future critical incidents, disruptions, and disasters with a new approach. Unlike critical incidents we've experienced before where history has given us a playbook, COVID-19 has a whole host of unknowns. The questions of how to return to operations or when are, at best, educated guesses. In the COVID-19 era, organizations need more than just an emergency preparedness and response solution; they need clear, centralized plans and response procedures, along with complete situational awareness for informed decision making as the situation evolves. As more organizations enter the next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic — restarting operations in the new normal — there is an increased need for pandemic-specific workflows such as employee health checks or contact tracing to monitor the constantly changing situation to keep employees, vendors, and guests safe. The slideshow above outlines four ways that organizations can improve their emergency response plans during the reopening phase of the pandemic. Although the strategies mentioned above may be implemented differently across organizations, the use of a critical incident management platform can assist with centralizing key data information to improve emergency preparedness and response throughout the duration of this pandemic. By combining emergency preparedness and response solutions with pandemic-specific workflows, such as contact tracing and case management, organizations can effectively and safely address the complexities of returning to a normal state of operations. Robert Watson ([email protected]) is CEO of Juvare, which provides various organizations and entities with emergency preparedness response technology. Related: |

• Macro risks and other COVID-19-related threats impacting the insurance industry
• 7 reasons the U.S. COVID-19 picture Is so fuzzy
• The initial effects of COVID-19 on insurance employment