Lt. Cmdr. Marty Baumbach on working with health systems to respond to disasters

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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Marty Baumbach, a lieutenant commander in the Navy who works as joint regional medical plans and operations officer for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Baumbach told Healthcare Brew how he works with federal agencies to respond to disasters, and how Covid-19 improved the nation’s medical response forces.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in healthcare?

I advise and assist our local, state, and federal partners on the use of Department of Defense (DOD) medical capabilities in response to disasters. I primarily work with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), as well as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), state health departments, and local health systems. I work on developing responses to all kinds of disasters, from an active shooter to a nuclear detonation, as well as the more common and likely events like a hurricane—everything that you might need to respond to. It’s my job to help shape the requests that come from the state through FEMA to make sure that I can find the right resources to meet the needs at the local level.

What’s the best change you’ve made or seen at a place where you’ve worked?

Covid served to increase the communication and coordination between the various medical response forces in the US—something that will serve us well if we ever enter a large-scale combat operation that stresses the US health system. Our job is a lot about establishing trust and building relationships before something happens so there’s a very effective partnership that already exists. Whether it’s hurricanes or wildfires or the pandemic response, it provides us an opportunity to demonstrate our nation’s readiness, our responsiveness, our capability. The Covid pandemic really required at the federal level a lot of coordination for resource allocation for medical countermeasures. It really mandated a whole government approach that we hadn’t really been able to replicate until then, so it was really, really beneficial.

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

Reducing human suffering. We’re there to support our local and state partners with whatever they identify that they need that they don’t have, and the best thing I can do is give leaders enough time and space to make quick decisions about what resources can be allocated to meet that problem. That’s the benefit of having a medical planner that’s familiar with the DOD’s medical capabilities on the team, because there’s not a lot of time wasted considering options.

What’s one health tech product or platform that’s made your life easier?

MHS Genesis is the military’s new electronic health record (EHR) that’s been rolling out over the last several years. Historically, the data that resides in the military health system’s EHR has been so valuable to researchers and others because it just covers such a wide range of people and it’s so much data. It has been a challenge to connect individuals’ data from across that health record. That’s what MHS Genesis hopes to address. It will eventually provide the DOD’s 9.6 million beneficiaries and 205,000 medical providers with a single, integrated health record across the continuum of care.