For the average person, power outages are inconvenient. For the growing number of people who depend on life support devices and other electric-powered medical equipment in their homes, even short-term outages can become a matter of life and death, especially when outages occur with little warning.
Absent a reliable source of backup power, many people who depend on life support and other types of durable medical equipment (DME) rely on hospital emergency departments or emergency shelters during an outage, simply seeking a place to plug in their device. For this reason, the CDC and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) provided funding and technical assistance to help launch Power Outage Partners, a groundbreaking Powered for Patients program piloted with the Louisiana Department of Health.
The pilot sought to provide invasively ventilated Louisianans living at home with funding to enable them to purchase additional battery capacity for ventilators and other life support equipment, allowing more time for safe evacuations. In short duration outages, the need for evacuation may be eliminated.
This groundbreaking program provides a roadmap that other jurisdictions can follow to boost their support for DME users during power outages. This roadmap is detailed in Advanced Preparedness for Life Support Users During Power Outages, a Toolkit ASTHO published in August 2023. As the project director for the Louisiana pilot, ASTHO hired Eric Cote to author the Toolkit, which continues to serve as a resource for jurisdictions across the U.S.