Feasibility testing of an online tool to facilitate exercise performance evaluation

We developed a web-based, interactive catalogue of exercise performance measures to help address the challenge many public health and health agencies face when trying to identify valid and reliable performance measures for emergency preparedness and response exercises.  This web-based catalogue is also supported by an online tool that can format the measures selected by the user into an evaluation tool that the user can use to observe and grade performance in emergency exercises.  The purpose of this study was to validate the feasibility of the online tool for creating appropriate exercise evaluation, through its use in multiple exercises. The online catalogue contains about 160 individual measures that were selected, edited and tested in over 30 different emergency preparedness exercises. Users can identify relevant evaluation measures and create their own exercise evaluation by searching the online catalogue for measures using the public health and healthcare preparedness capabilities, appropriate Incident Response Stage and/or list of suggested keywords. The online tool also provides the end user with an optional analytical feature that can generate basic outputs based on the exercise data. Five healthcare and 17 public health agencies from 9 states used the tool to evaluate exercise performance. Structured interviews were conducted with all users to assess the use of the tool during exercise evaluation planning efforts, compare the tool with other instruments of evaluation and determine how results can be used for after action reporting purposes. The finding will also lay groundwork for further development of exercise performance measurement tools and criteria.