The incident management measurement tool (IMMT): A tool for measuring public health incident management during and after emergencies

The authors present a new tool for health departments and their partners to improve public health incident management, the Incident Management Measurement Tool (IMMT). The IMMT is explicitly designed to measure key domains of incident management during and after public health incidents and realistic exercises, complementing other post-incident tools and approaches such as Homeland Security Exercise Evaluation Program10 and after-action reviews. The tool is designed to reduce the burden and improve the reliability of data collection and analysis in a way that meets the needs especially of medium- and small-sized communities, which often lack robust evaluation resources, and can be used across a variety of incident management structures

The IMMT consists of 2 modular data collection methods, a survey of the incident management team and a protocol for a peer assessor. Pilot testing suggested that the tool is valid, reliable, feasible, and useful. Measurement of public health incident management is feasible and may be useful for improving response times and outcomes. Moreover, a limited set of standard measures is relevant to a wide range of incident response contexts.