Millions of at-risk individuals, particularly older adults and those who are chronically ill, rely upon essential healthcare services and on electricity-dependent durable medical and assistive equipment and devices.
Local incidents such as prolonged power outages and large-scale public health emergencies can disrupt access to healthcare and rapidly thrust those at-risk individuals into life threatening situations within hours or days.
In 2013, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response expanded their partnership with CMS and launched the “HHS emPOWER Program” to protect Medicare Program claims data. The initially included at-risk population data for those who relied on life maintaining electricity-dependent DME and was later expanded to include the chronically ill at-risk population who rely on certain essential healthcare services
Currently, the HHS emPOWER Program data covers 4.4 million Medicare beneficiaries of which 2.7 million have a claim for electricity-dependent DME. Over two million have a claim for at least one of four healthcare services.
In 2021, the HHS emPOWER Program developed a new emPOWER COVID-19 At-Risk Medicare population along with a suite of dataset, mapping, and dashboard tools, as well as trainings and informational resources to support COVID-19 preparedness, community mitigation, response and recovery public health activities including education and vaccination outreach efforts.
Users can now obtain de-identified totals for Medicare beneficiaries who are currently enrolled in CMS Medicare Fee-For-service (Parts A/B) and Medicare Advantage (Part C) programs. Also available, is the number of Medicare beneficiaries that have a claim for one or more of the fourteen types of life maintaining or saving electricity-dependent durable medical and assistive equipment, plus the number of implanted electricity dependent cardiac devices in selected geographic areas.
Go to https://empowerprogram.hhs.gov/about.html for more information on the HHS emPOWER Program.