The Pennsylvania Public Health Risk Assessment Tool (PHRAT) was developed for the Pennsylvania Department of Health to help public health and health care planners prioritize their planning efforts for emergencies that impact the health of the public. The Pennsylvania Department of Health used funding from the CDC’s Risk-based Funding Pilot Project to contract with the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication to complete the PHRAT.

The PHRAT workbook and user guide lead planners through an analysis of the health-related impacts of various hazards that can occur in their jurisdictions. The PHRAT assesses the planning that is necessary to ensure access to emergency response and preparedness resources, taking into account the services provided by public health agencies and the healthcare system. This tool can be used to generate a composite risk to the overall health of the entire jurisdiction, or it can be used to assess the risk of a hazard from the perspective of either the public health system or healthcare system, respectively.

To assess the public health risk that results from a specific hazard, severity is measured in five major domains: human health, healthcare services, inpatient healthcare infrastructure, community health and public health services. This tool takes a quantitative approach to impact assessment, measuring baseline levels of morbidity, services, and activities, and comparing them to the morbidity, service impacts and activities that result from specific hazard incidents.

The Pennsylvania PHRAT and User Guide can be downloaded here:

PHRAT Guide

PHRAT Tool