The Johns Hopkins office of critical event preparedness and response

The Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR) is an office of the Johns Hopkins Institutions chartered to oversee medical disaster preparedness planning for the Johns Hopkins Enterprise. CEPAR is focused on developing a coordinated response to an incident that may involve mass casualties or other significant events that may involve fewer patients but still stress the health care system. CEPAR oversees medical preparedness policy development and planning activities across all Hopkins affiliates, coordinates drills and exercises, and acts as the single voice for Johns Hopkins to the emergency response community. In the event of a health care-related incident, the office will serve as a command system to coordinate the response of all of Hopkins' resources, and will be a single point of contact for local, state, federal, and military response management agencies. CEPAR development is a collaboative project between Hopkins Medicine and APL. APL serves as the systems engineer to define CEPAR's concept of operations, architecture, and supporting systems requirements. This article summarizes the development of the Office of CEPAR, its accomplishments to date, and the current focus of its development efforts.