Updated 12.16.25
Health Plan Member-Focused Emergency Practices Roadmap, (2021) Health Plan Emergency Practices Slide Deck (10/25/21)
A report from the World Institute on Disability, written by June Isaacson Kailes, Disability Policy Consultant, investigates and documents promising member-centered emergency interventions. These critical procedures include applying lessons from COVID-19 and other co-occurring and past emergencies.
Screen readers version of Health Plan Member-Focused Emergency Practices Roadmap
The Roadmap aims to strengthen, create, promote, and embed emergency practices into member-centered health plans’ processes, helping members successfully manage, endure, and survive emergencies. Health plans are often overlooked as essential partners before, during, and after emergencies. Yet, more than any other service system, health plans, both public and private, serve the majority of people with disabilities in the United States.
Health plans play critical emergency roles in addressing and protecting their members’ resilience, health, safety, and independence. In emergencies, health plans can prevent or mitigate the cascading of adverse emergency effects of typically well-controlled chronic health conditions. Like a house of cards, the balance can easily be disrupted or collapse. Targeted prevention includes protection from the degrading failure of:
- personal support systems
- loss of supplies
- loss of medications
- loss of technologies
- loss of customized accessible environments
- equitable access to disaster response programs, services, and activities
The audience for this Roadmap is broad and addresses a range of stakeholder concerns, including:
- frontline health plan staff and leadership
- medical service providers and home and community-based services
- provider organizations such as adult day programs, home health care services, and community-based agencies
Stakeholder concerns covered include the roles and possible actions of:
- accrediting organizations, standard-setting bodies, and quality assurance organizations
- disability-led, disability-focused, and community-based organization
- emergency management consultants
- emergency managers and planners
- Federal and state legislatures
- Federal, state, and local health agencies
- grantmakers
- health plan leadership and staff
- researchers
Major focus of this Roadmap is:
- Health Plan Leadership
- Case management, care planning, and care coordination
- Pharmacy
- Member emergency communication
- Contractor and vendor agreements
- Community partnerships
- Workforce training
- Policy change opportunities