Reimagining Business Continuity Management in Healthcare
Hospitals and health care facilities often anchor their preparedness programs in emergency management frameworks, emphasizing response to public-facing incidents. While essential, this approach can overlook the broader scope of organizational disruptions that threaten the continuity of critical services. This 45-minute session challenges the traditional lens by proposing a shift: adopting business continuity management (BCM) as the foundational methodology for hospital preparedness. Drawing on the DRI International Professional Practices for BCM, the presentation explores how hospitals can enhance resilience by reframing their perspective—viewing patients, families, and clients as customers, and aligning practices with industries like finance that have long prioritized continuity. Participants will examine the differences between emergency response and business continuity, understand how BCM offers a more comprehensive and proactive strategy, and learn practical ways to embed continuity into hospital operations. BCM is a cornerstone of organizational resilience, supporting strategic alignment across key domains such as cybersecurity, communications, physical security, and disaster recovery. When properly integrated, BCM promotes a unified, system-wide approach to risk and disruption—bridging silos and ensuring coordinated responses across multiple functions. Designed for healthcare professionals, this session provides actionable insights to help organizations get “more bang for their buck” by integrating BCM principles into their preparedness efforts—ultimately ensuring critical functions continue seamlessly in the face of disruption.
Richard has over a decade of experience in emergency management and business continuity, with a strong background working in both municipal and territorial settings. He currently serves as the Manager of Emergency Management and Business Continuity at William Osler Health System. Richard holds a Master of Disaster and Emergency Management, is a Certified Healthcare Emergency Manager at the mastery level, and is also a Certified Business Continuity Professional (ABCP) and has enhanced his leadership skills through Harvard's National Preparedness Leadership Initiative.
Having worked in various roles across municipal regions, including York Region and Peel Region, as well as in the Northwest Territories, Richard brings extensive knowledge and experience to his role. As a neurodiverse professional, Richard values a range of cognitive approaches to problem-solving, believing that diverse perspectives lead to innovative solutions. He integrates these insights into his work, fostering inclusive and adaptable strategies. Richard is passionate about business continuity and advocates for a comprehensive, integrated approach to ensure organizational resilience. He is dedicated to aligning business continuity planning with organizational strategies, fostering preparedness, and maintaining continuity across diverse sectors, particularly within healthcare and government settings.
Don't Eat Your Young: Mentoring the Next Generation of Emergency Management Professionals
This presentation will share real world anecdotes of how facility and community resiliency was increased based on interpersonal relationships. Techniques on how to build and maintain these relationships will be discussed so as to meet the needs of multiple agencies. The presentation will conclude with the story of the 2023 Derecho in Northeast Missouri and how these partnerships helped a long-term care facility respond to a large-scale power outage when local responders were overwhelmed.
Chris Blomgren retired from the volunteer fire service and public emergency management service after 30 years of public service. During his tenure with Kahoka & Clark County Fire and Emergency Management Agencies, Chris created interagency training and exercise plans incorporating hundreds of participants from rural Missouri annually. As a volunteer leader with Team Rubicon, Chris designed the organization's first full-scale mobilization exercise incorporating dozens of agencies and over 100 volunteers, an event setting the standard for pre-planned events in the organization. Chris currently consults with healthcare facilities on rural healthcare preparedness, focusing on partnerships, planning, training, and exercises. Chris holds an associate degree in nursing (RN), a bachelor degree in psychology and a masters degree in emergency preparedness. He has completed the Master Exercise Practitioner Program and National Emergency Management Executive Academy and is recently received his Certified Healthcare Emergency Coordinator-II certification. When not assisting healthcare facilities in emergency preparedness activities, he resides on a 23-acre homestead in northeast Missouri, and shares his passion on facility and community resiliency and partnerships with his idiom, "I Know a Guy".
Rapid Response: Hospital Evacuation
On average, there are around 4 full hospital evacuations per year in the United States. On June 18th, 2025 an event occurred at OhioHealth Berger Hospital requiring an immediate hospital evacuation. This presentation will review the event, why it happened, and how we recovered an entire hospital within 30 hours.
Matt is the System Director of Physical Environment, EHS, and Emergency Management for OhioHealth, a 16-hospital healthcare system with over 500 ambulatory locations employing 40,000 associates based out of Columbus, Ohio. With over 18 years of experience in Safety & Emergency Management across various sectors including warehousing, non-profits, and healthcare, Matt has built a robust program ensuring continuity of care and the safety of all associates, patients, and visitors within the physical environment.
Matt holds a bachelor’s degree in safety management from Franklin University and an MBA in Risk Management from Ohio Dominican University. In his spare time, Matt enjoys outdoor activities such as hunting, fishing, and playing sports with his kids. He is also a passionate Cleveland Browns fan, always hopeful for the next season.
Lauren is the System Manager of Emergency Management at OhioHealth, a 16-hospital healthcare system based in Columbus, Ohio. With over 17 years of experience in emergency management, Lauren has led preparedness and response efforts across healthcare, public health, and local and state government sectors. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Paralegal Studies from the University of Toledo and a master’s degree in Emergency and Disaster Management from American Public University. Lauren is passionate about building resilient systems and fostering cross-sector collaboration to improve emergency preparedness. Outside of work, Lauren enjoys tackling home improvement projects and unwinding on cruise vacations with her family.
Refining EMS Interstate Transport of Patients with High Consequence
High-consequence infectious diseases (HCIDs) are pathogens associated with high mortality and morbidity that pose a significant threat to public health. Common examples of HCIDs include Ebola Virus, Marburg Virus, Lassa Fever, and other viral hemorrhagic fevers. Due to their rarity, the United States healthcare system has a limited capacity to provide long-term care for patients infected with an HCID; however, there are several of highly specialized biocontainment units (BCUs) throughout the country that are well-equipped to care for multiple HCID patients for the duration of their illness. Geographically dispersed, these BCUs are few and far between. Within HHS Region 2, which includes New York State, New Jersey State, and the territories of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, there are only five hospitals with a BCU capable of providing potentially lifesaving medical care to HCID patients, most of which are located in the NYC metro area. This makes the ability to efficiently and safely transport patients with HCIDs to one of these specialized hospitals critical. Over the last few years NYC H+H/ Bellevue, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR)-designated Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center (RESPTC) for HHS Region 2, has worked to update the regional patient transport concept of operations (CONOPS), which outlines scenario-based approaches for transporting these patients within the diverse areas of the region and factors to consider when determining whether patient transport is warranted. To develop the CONOPS, Bellevue and the NYC DOHMH worked closely with the federal government, state governments, local public health departments, public and private healthcare institutions, EMS agencies, and non-profit stakeholders from across the region. In 2023, the Region 2 CONOPS was the focus of a large workshop, where all stakeholders from across the states and territories collaborated to review, and discuss ways to further improve the plan. In 2025, the newly revised CONOPS was exercised in the Tranquil Passport Full Scale Exercise conducted by ASPR, simulating a VHF cluster during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. In this multi-site, multi-day exercise, patients were flown to different BCU’s across the country as part of the ASPR Cluster plan for HCID, with Bellevue being one of the participating sites. Two patients were flown in from Toronto Pearson International Airport to LaGuardia Airport and driven to Bellevue via FDNY EMS ambulances. Bellevue activated their BCU, accepted the patients in their fire lane, admitted a pediatric HCID patient, and tested two new protocols during the exercise. The lessons learned working with our regional partners in the workshop and during the Tranquil Passport exercise allow us to refine and continually strengthen our regional HCID patient transport plans in order to deliver the highest-quality care to patients that may have contracted a severe and infectious illness.
Jory Guttsman is the Director of Emergency Management at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, an 844-bed Level 1 Trauma Center in New York City. He is responsible for leading the hospital’s emergency management program. Jory previously served in a similar capacity at NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem. Jory oversees all aspects of emergency management at the nation’s oldest public hospital, and has extensive experience in planning, exercises, and response in a large-scale, urban healthcare facility. Jory serves as the chair of the hospital’s Emergency Management Committee and has led numerous preparedness initiatives for staff and patients at his hospital. In his role, Jory frequently works with numerous local, state, and federal partners to plan for all-hazards. In addition, Jory is the EMS Operational lead for Bellevue in its role as the Regional Emerging Special Pathogen Treatment Center and leads their quarterly exercises. Jory is also an active volunteer EMT in Brooklyn, New York, where he is the Finance Chair of the Board of Directors, and former President and VP of Operations.
Jory has a Master’s in Public Education from Baruch College’s Executive MPA program, and holds numerous certifications, including Healthcare Emergency Manager – Professional (AHEPP), Certified Emergency Manager (IAEM), Certified Healthcare Emergency Professional (IBFCSM), and New York State EMT-B.
What Next? Lessons Learned from a Systemwide 30-day Network Outage Functional Exercise
Business continuity is the ability of an organization to maintain essential functions during and after a disaster or disruption. For a healthcare system, business continuity is vital to ensure the safety and well-being of patients, staff, and the community. With some simple modifications of business continuity tools and processes, this MidWest organization was able to successfully plan for a 30 day network outage as evidenced by an organization-wide functional exercise. In this presentation, we will share our experience and lessons learned from developing and implementing a business continuity program and conducting a functional 30-day network outage exercise for a large healthcare system in the United States. We will discuss the following topics: • The key steps and components of a business continuity program and how we modified the process making it easier for the end users. • The best practices and tools for engaging and collaborating with various departments, units, and facilities within the healthcare system, as well as external partners and regulators. • Lessons learned from implementing the modified process and conducting a functional 30-day network outage exercise for a large healthcare system. We hope that our presentation will provide valuable insights and guidance for other healthcare organizations that are interested in developing or improving their business continuity programs and extending that process to plan for a 30d network outage. We also welcome feedback and suggestions from the audience to further improve our practice and learn from each other.
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Dr. Bulson currently serves as Corewell Health’s Director, Business Assurance. Dr. Bulson is instrumental in the development of a comprehensive system level healthcare emergency preparedness and response program. She is responsible for program design, development, implementation, operational readiness and resilience, situation management, and business continuity for Corewell Health – a large integrated health system in Michigan. She represents healthcare emergency preparedness on many federal, state, and regional healthcare preparedness planning committees. Dr. Bulson has also been a guest lecturer for healthcare emergency preparedness for multiple local nursing programs as well as several healthcare emergency preparedness conferences and has co-authored several articles related to healthcare emergency preparedness and response. Her research interests continue to be related to impact and outcomes of emergency preparedness education on healthcare workers and organizational resiliency.
Amanda Lemkuil, MPH, is the Manager of Business Continuity and Operational Readiness at Corewell Health. With over 12 years of experience in emergency management, Amanda brings a deep understanding of healthcare resilience and crisis response. She has spent the past two years leading Corewell Health’s business continuity initiatives. Her leadership has been instrumental in navigating high-impact incidents such as the Baxter IV solutions shortage and the CrowdStrike outage. Most recently, Amanda led a yearlong, system-wide project to strengthen organizational preparedness for a potential 30-day network disruption, significantly advancing the maturity of the business continuity program.
Meeting Regulatory Compliance in the Wake of Federal Restructuring
The current financial climate at the federal level has created funding concerns for healthcare coalitions nationally. With growing uncertainty for how future funding and preparedness guidance at risk, healthcare organizations are faced with meeting regulatory compliance in the absence of the long-standing foundational support structures of healthcare coalitions. In this presentation, Dr. Santa Maria will discuss the current situation related to federal funding and how that will affect healthcare readiness from a national and local perspective. Dr. Santa Maria will outline specific measures that can be taken by healthcare organizations to maintain compliance with CMS, Joint Commission, DNV, and other regulatory standards while operating in a new space. Creating a process that will maintain high levels of disaster preparedness will be a challenging objective as healthcare moves forward and attendees will benefit from the insight and tools provided in this presentation.
Greg Santa Maria, DHSc, MA, CHEP, is a visionary leader in healthcare emergency management who speaks frequently at national conferences on innovative concepts in disaster management. He is currently the Director of Safety and Emergency Management at AdventHealth, with oversight of 20 hospitals and emergency departments and over 4500 beds. Dr. Santa Maria is the former Executive Director of the South Dakota Health Care Coalition and has nearly 30 years of experience in Emergency Medical Services and Healthcare Emergency Management, specializing in the development of complex healthcare response plans. Dr Santa Maria has a special interest in the development of dynamic healthcare emergency management programs and comprehensive emergency operations processes. In his previous role as Director of Public Safety at Sanford Health, he maintained oversight of enterprise safety, security, and emergency management functions for 44 hospitals and more than 200 senior care locations in 26 states and nine countries. Dr. Santa Maria supported corporate operations in response to the Coronavirus, Ebola, H1N1, and multiple mass gathering events.
Dr. Santa Maria is a former NYC paramedic and paramedic educator, and currently serves as a non-physician subject matter expert for the American Academy of Disaster Medicine and is the Chair of the National Advisory Committee on Seniors and Disaster. He is also a founding member and past president of the SD Healthcare Coalition Governing Board. Dr. Santa Maria holds a Doctorate in Health Science and a master’s degree in emergency and disaster management
Design and Efficacy of Pocket Exercises to Enhance Emergency Department Readiness
In an era where emergency departments face persistent capacity, staffing, and other operations challenges, maintaining staff readiness for low-frequency, high-impact events—such as mass casualty incidents (MCIs)—remains a formidable task. Traditional training approaches often disrupt clinical workflows and can become deprioritized amidst daily operational demands. The "pocket exercise" approach introduces a scalable, drop-in model designed to deliver concise, high-yield training sessions directly to clinical staff within their work environment. Employment of “pocket exercises” within the Massachusetts General Hospital Emergency Department, has enabled brief, targeted education across shifts, ensuring that essential protocols for disaster and emergency response are routinely reinforced without interrupting patient care and leveraging real-world conditions. These pocket exercises focus on critical elements of emergency protocols and empower clinicians to enact immediate, operational steps tailored to their specific settings. Furthermore, the flexible format allows for adaptation across various disaster scenarios, supporting a culture of ongoing preparedness and resilience. To assess the effectiveness of this approach, participants were surveyed after attending a single ten-minute drop-in drill. The results revealed that 95% of participants (N=X) reported feeling fairly or completely confident in their ability to respond to a mass casualty incident (MCI), representing a 45% increase in confidence following the drill. In this workshop, participants will leverage their existing Mass Casualty Incident Protocols and work stepwise to establish how to engage stakeholders for buy-in, identify critical actions within their protocols, and create a pocket exercise template that can be leveraged at their institution.
Jennifer Shearer is the Director of Emergency Preparedness supporting Massachusetts General Hospital, Mass Eye and Ear, and Cooley Dickinson Hospital. As part of this work, she manages and implements the institution’s emergency preparedness and response program to establish and maintain resilience to a variety of emergency situations while ensuring the continuation of safety for patients, staff, visitors, and facilities. Jennifer earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Human Biology from Michigan State University and a Master of Public Health in Hospital and Molecular Epidemiology from the University of Michigan.
Teresa Klink serves as the Emergency Preparedness Program Manager for Massachusetts General Hospital and Mass Eye and Ear. In this role, she oversees and implements the hospital's mass casualty plans, emergency communications, and other program areas to ensure a high level of preparedness across the institution. Teresa holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Homeland Security, Emergency Preparedness, and Cybersecurity with a focus on Emergency Management from the University at Albany. She also earned a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice from the University at Albany.
The Hotel2Hospital Project: A Practical Solution for Medical Surge
The Problem: A Prolonged Medical Surge. The Department of Defense estimates that, in a Large-Scale Combat Operation (LSCO) scenario with 1,000 combat casualties returning to the US per day for 100 days, the healthcare systems would exhaust national bed capacity within 10–12 days. The Solution: Convert a Hotel into a Hospital. Team Colorado (a coalition including UCHealth, the University of Colorado, All Clear Emergency Management Group, and other key partners) launched the first-of-its-kind Hotel-to-Hospital (H2H) pilot project. This multi-year research project demonstrated how a hotel can be converted quickly (within 2-4 weeks) into an Alternate Care Facility (ACF) with both medical-surgical and intensive care capabilities and operate as a “wing” of a hospital as a response to a prolonged medical surge. Team Colorado wrote the H2H Conversion Playbook with architectural drawings, engineering plans, checklists, and strategies to guide hospital emergency managers and other response partners through the hotel conversion and establish operations. The contents of the H2H Playbook were validated in a full-scale demonstration where portions of a hotel were converted into hospital spaces. The Ask: Provide Expertise. Hospital emergency managers are the key users of the H2H Conversion Playbook and central to H2H conversion. Team Colorado is seeking input for the next version of the H2H Conversion Playbook.
Ms. Jenny Schmitz is the Vice President of All Clear Emergency Management Group, LLC., and has worked in public health and hospital emergency management for more than 20 years. During COVID-19, she worked with the state of Colorado to establish and operationalize five Alternate Care Facilities (ACFs). Ms. Schmitz received her master’s degree in international studies (with concentrations in Global Health and International Security) from the University of Denver and her B.A. in International Studies from St. Cloud State University. She is a FEMA Master Exercise Practitioner (MEP) and served as the Safety Officer on the Colorado-3 Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT).
Jason Persoff, MD, SFHM is a hospitalist and Assistant Medical Director of Emergency Preparedness at the University of Colorado Hospital. He is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine with extensive experience in disaster medicine that began as an EMT responding to the World Youth Day Papal Visit in Colorado in 1993. While storm chasing, Dr. Persoff responded the Joplin, MO tornado in May 2011. He is a leader in advocating for including hospital medicine into disaster preparedness. He has worked on grants examining ethical triage during crisis standards of care and is active with the Task Force for Mass Critical Care