The National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS): Understanding user needs and decisions at the local to regional scale
Abstract
The National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) is a decision-maker-focused system of federal, state, local, nongovernmental, and private sector of practitioners, researchers, who produce and share information to inform decisions which reduce the health risks of extreme heat at all timescales - from recovery and response to preparedness and planning. Two of the primary mechanisms by which NIHHIS carries out its activities are its interagency working group and its regional pilots. The NIHHIS interagency working group was formed early in 2016 and is comprised of NOAA and CDC, the two founding agencies of NIHHIS, as well as OSHA, FEMA, ASPR, NIOSH, SAMHSA, EPA. Together this group has compiled resources on an interagency portal (http://climate.gov/nihhis), coordinated pre-heat season social media campaigns, and begun a process to understand and potentially crosswalk the varying activity modification guidelines for athletes, outdoor workers, and the military. The NIHHIS pilots are engagements to sample the local context of heat health risk, which is composed of local and regional climate characteristics, social vulnerability factors, institutional connections and captivity, and other factors. These are discovered using a 'decision calendar' approach. In this approach, populations of concern are identified and an interdisciplinary set of decision makers is assembled to discuss the risk factors and potential interventions for these populations. The process is iterative, and is intended to result in a timescale explicit documentation of the decisions which must be made to protect specific populations and the information needs to support those decisions, complemented by risk tolerance and other relevant information. The interagency team will ultimately use decision calendars to better deliver heat health information and services to decision makers. This presentation focuses on NIHHIS pilots in the Southwest and Northeast, each of which discovered special characteristics of local context, and which worked widely within the NIHHIS core questions on capacity, communication, predictions and other information, health parameters and outcomes, and interventions. We will provide examples of successful outcomes from this process and discuss lessons learned along the way.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMPA23G1067J
- Keywords:
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- 6309 Decision making under uncertainty;
- POLICY SCIENCESDE: 6620 Science policy;
- PUBLIC ISSUES