HIGH ALERT INSTITUTE INC

The High Alert Institute, Inc. seeks to analyze the published scientific literature to determine Performance Criteria to inform disaster planning and response.

The High Alert Institute, Inc. has assembled an interdisciplinary team to read, review, critique and extract data from the published peer-reviewed scientific literature. This data will undergo analysis using Fleiss method to set Performance Criteria for the disaster healthcare practice or intervention reviewed. These analyses will be compiled into meta-analyses and submitted to respected peer-reviewed journals for publication.

For the past 30+ years, Allison Sakara has been a regulatory affairs consultant to the medical device industry worldwide. Her specialty is compiling literature based meta-analyses for the purpose of quantifying success benchmarks and/or safety benchmarks for new and novel medical devices and procedures. Allison is also a 20 year veteran of the NDMS/DMAT system and a member of the Florida Disaster Behavioral Health Response Team.

Ms. Sakara and the members of the board of the High Alert Institute, Inc. have long believed at the same method used by FDA and NIH to establish Objective Performance Criteria (OPC's) could and should be applied to the existing world literature in Disaster Medicine and Disaster Behavioral Health.

Ms. Sakara has worked with the former head of the FDA Office of Statistical Analysis and learned the FDA's and NIH's preferred analysis method for small population and heterogeneous data sources. The Fleiss Method provides an inverse variance weighted study rate from articles not otherwise appropriate for combination or comparison due to heterogeneous populations, data collection methods or data endpoints across the articles. This study rate can be used to derive a Performance Criteria for the intervention studied.

To date the High Alert Institute has reached one of six milestones that define progress for the High Alert Institute's current project. The Insititute has assembled an interdisciplinary team of article reviewers to read, review, critique and extract data from published scientific articles.

Remaining milestones include:

- Collect data on a specific outcome from a specific disaster response technique or practice.
- Derive a Performance Criteria for the specific disaster response technique or practice studied.
- Compile the data and Performance Criteria into meta-analysis
- Publish the meta-analysis containing the Performance Criteria in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
- Have governments, emergency management organizations, healthcare institutions and the disaster response community adopt the published Performance Criteria as a standard for planning, simulations and after action reviews.