In the past several years, our country has made encouraging headway in preparing the U.S. health care and public health care infrastructures to respond to acts of bioterrorism or other major public health emergencies. However, ensuring our health care system can respond quickly and effectively to a catastrophic event continues to be a complex and challenging undertaking that involves coordinating the efforts of stakeholders in many jurisdictions, regions, and delivery systems. The success of local, State, and national efforts requires that these stakeholders have information about the latest research, tools, and models related to bioterrorism and health system preparedness.

Over the past three years, Health Systems Research, Inc. (HSR) has assisted the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) - in collaboration with its sister Federal agencies, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention - in its efforts to share evidence-based information and tools that can help public health officials, health systems decisionmakers, and providers detect and respond to acts of bioterrorism more effectively and efficiently. We have done this by assisting in the design and conduct of a series of Web conferences that provide these target audiences with the latest information about:

• Federal efforts to ensure rapid development of system capacity to respond
• Promising practices and strategies being developed at the State, local, and health system levels to promote health systems readiness
• Methods and tools developed through federally supported health services research efforts that can aid in developing system capacity and enhancing readiness to respond.

The topics that individual Web conferences have addressed include:

• Issues and strategies related to the threat of smallpox
• Disaster planning, including insights and lessons learned from recently completed disaster planning drills
• Available tools for conducting readiness assessments
• The use of information technology and surveillance systems in communicating and monitoring disaster events
• Strategies for establishing linkages between hospitals and a broad range of community providers
• Surge capacity issues
• The use of overlooked community resources, such as nursing homes, shuttered hospitals, and primary care settings
• Regionalization strategies.