On Sept 7, tens of thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees were in shelters, hotels, and homes across Dallas, struggling to adjust to the tragedy. Any traces of normalcy at the Fort Worth headquarters of technology consultants enSYNC Corporation were swept away at 3 pm when the phone rang. Dallas County needed a system to link refugees with local healthcare resources and needed one fast. By 9 am the next day, a crew of five enSYNC employees had built the IT backbone of Project Katrina.

“We had a responsibility as citizens of Texas,” says enSYNC President Mark Jones. “We needed to help these people. We are so proud to have been involved with that.”

The system enSYNC built for Project Katrina is a Web site that is a mirror image to the site enSYNC built for Project Access Dallas. It is backed by a database that allows healthcare and relief workers assisting evacuees to register them and help them find specific healthcare services in Dallas County. The iMIS database stores information about evacuees and providers to help workers match needs with healthcare resources and to facilitate record keeping. The Web front-end allows easy but secure access for authorized case workers across the county.

Project Katrina is modeled on and part of Project Access Dallas (www.projectaccess.info), which links uninsured Dallas residents with healthcare providers. Project Access Dallas is administered by DCMS and directed by Jim Walton, DO, using technology provided by enSYNC. To implement the service for Katrina evacuees, however, enSYNC had to build a new Web site and database.

Using the system, case workers from county governments, hospitals, clinics, and charity organizations such as Central Dallas Ministries can enroll evacuees who have a FEMA number and then match them with healthcare providers, including the hundreds of physicians who have volunteered their time. The case workers can help evacuees find specialists and set up appointments, Mr Jones says. The system also can capture demographic and outcomes data to allow researchers to assess whom the project has served and how.

The large, mostly temporary patient population of evacuees has been better served by the opportunity to seek care through Project Katrina than through the typical alternative: the nearest emergency room. Meanwhile, hospitals are better off without a stream of patients with routine healthcare needs coming through the ER doors. Project Katrina (and Project Access Dallas, for that matter) provides a sensible way to direct patients to care that is more appropriately delivered somewhere other than an ER.

Establishing a more sensible alternative on the scale of an entire county indeed requires information technology. In essence, the mammoth task involved providing an instantaneous, constantly available system to link about 25,000 Katrina evacuees with individual physicians and medical networks covering subspecialty care, mental healthcare resources, laboratories, imaging facilities, pharmacies, and hospitals.

People would have found a way to do this with pencils and paper, if they had to, but it is much easier, faster, and more secure when done electronically.

When the phone rang on Sept 7, Mr Jones and his employees at enSYNC had a chance to help thousands of people. They did so quickly, skillfully, and, like all the volunteers helping Katrina victims, at no charge.

The author of this monthly column, David Orenstein, is a technology and business writer in Silicon Valley. If you have a question about a Computing Care column or to request a future topic, email him at davealli@comcast.net.