Automating Compassion: Technology-Driven Wellness Checks for Vulnerable Populations

Extended utility outages and disaster events create urgent risks for individuals who rely on electricity, water, or medical support to maintain health and safety. Emergency management agencies are often legally or ethically obligated to conduct wellness checks, yet traditional methods are labor-intensive, slow to scale, and difficult to sustain during prolonged incidents. This session presents a practical, technology-enabled framework for automating vulnerable population wellness checks using existing data, outage intelligence, and notification systems.

The presentation walks through a real-world implementation that integrates outage monitoring, data management, GIS, automation, and mass notification to rapidly identify affected individuals and trigger a tiered outreach process. Automated workflows reduce manual data handling, prioritize cases based on verified service disruptions, and generate actionable call lists and reporting for emergency operations staff. Multiple architectural approaches are examined-ranging from low-code automation to GIS-based notebooks and direct scripting-allowing agencies to select solutions that align with their technical capacity, budget, and governance constraints.