Whether you work for a hospital, are part of a healthcare coalition, or are a healthcare provider, emergency manager or a public health practitioner, you are probably looking for a smarter way to keep the people who rely on you healthy, safe, and informed when disaster strikes. Finding information is easy – finding the right information can be a lot harder.

That’s where ASPR TRACIE comes in.

The ASPR Technical Resources Assistance Center and Information Exchange (ASPR TRACIE) is a new information gateway that connects public health and medical professionals with the emergency preparedness, response and recovery information that they need. ASPR TRACIE can help you quickly identify resources to get your planning started, build on the experience of your colleagues, prioritize activities for the future, make smart decisions, find training, and get answers to your questions.

ASPR TRACIE is divided into three main parts:

• Technical Resources (TR): The technical resources section provides a collection of disaster, medical, healthcare and public health preparedness materials. This section includes a series of Topic Collections, which are annotated bibliographies vetted by experts in the field that highlight key resources under specific public health and medical topics. They include a short list of “Must Reads” as well as additional resources, such as studies, toolkits, lessons learned, planning guides, trainings and more. To go even more in depth on a topic, you can also search the ASPR TRACIE Resource Library, which includes the National Library of Medicine’s DisasterLitTM, a database of over 8,000 records from over 700 organizations.
• Assistance Center (AC): Sometimes, you need a person to help – a person with the expertise to provide guidance, identify gaps and answer questions. ASPR TRACIE Technical Assistance specialists can help you navigate the research materials; find resources to support training and exercises; identify upcoming training and exercises; and more.
• Information Exchange (IE): Working together, we can find better solutions than we do on our own. The Information Exchange provides discussion boards in a password protected environment. Users will be able to ask questions, discuss past experiences, and share plans and other resources.

Every disaster teaches us something new and disaster health is a complex, constantly evolving topic. Using ASPR TRACIE can help you and your organization plan for disasters more efficiently and effectively. To learn more about the resources that are available, check out the new ASPR TRACIE.

Do you have ideas on ways that we can make the site better, new topics that we could cover, or information that could help you plan, respond and recover?  Please send us your ideas!