While perusing PricewaterhouseCoopers Health Research Institute’s insightful report, "Closing the seams: Developing an integrated approach to health system disaster preparedness," about the healthcare industry’s ability to handle the aftermath of a disaster or pandemic I couldn’t seem to close my mind’s eye to its overwhelmingly astute thesis.

"When a disaster hits, Americans rely on a fragmented healthcare system to miraculously mount a timely, cohesive and effective recovery effort. Yet, the carefully orchestrated and sequenced medical responses to disasters lean on a disjointed health system."

Such sage observations seem to support a sense of futility and fatality among healthcare facilities even though PWCHRI provides some salient solutions to the challenges.

Any pandemic – whether it is avian influenza or some deadly antibiotic resistant infection – may invite comparisons to HIV and AIDS, the virus and disease that seemed to dominate the zeitgeist during the 1980s and 1990s, but that would be short-sighted and misplaced. The pandemic threats we fear today can be distributed simply by touch, which makes them that much more dangerous and frightening.

When I think of pandemic anything today, I’m reminded of a 1998 film and a short-lived science fiction television series during the 2005-2006 season.

In the film "Fallen," Denzel Washington played a detective who witnessed the execution of a convicted killer only to hear people on the street sing the same tune the killer sang in the gas chamber. It turns out that the real killer was a fallen angel cursed to roam the Earth by inhabiting people’s bodies. The demon can switch bodies by any contact. The most chilling scene in the movie is when Washington’s character pursues the demon onto a busy sidewalk bustling with pedestrian traffic. As the demon passes from passerby to passerby as one bumps into another, each possessed individual glares menacingly at Washington’s bewildered character as if to taunt him. How do you stop something like that?

In the short-lived CBS TV series "Threshold," the government assembles a crack team of scientists after the U.S. Navy finds an extra-terrestrial spaceship deep in the Atlantic Ocean. It turns out that the energy-based alien beings can inhabit bodies and proliferate by physical contact – and even eye contact. It’s up to the team of experts to keep track of everyone who’s possessed by the aliens while they try to figure out how to control them. The problem? They lose track of the initial group of alien possessed, which creatively should have meant curtains for the TV show because once you lose track of something that can multiply exponentially, well, the human race is doomed. Of course, low ratings beat the plot complication to the punch.

The bottom line was that in either epic the protagonists lost control or simply never had it from the start — no matter how simple or convoluted the containment or tracking schemes. Are there any parallels to, say, pandemic flu? Perhaps.

But the real challenge with any preparations is the proverbial X factor – the unknown. In this case, it’s how the general public will react to such a crisis. We see it in reel world disaster movies as well as in real world disasters. All of the well-choreographed and orchestrated drills and plans in the world can’t really account for one five-letter word – panic. No matter how prepared we are some aspect of panic sets in until we get a grip or all hell breaks loose.

Does that mean we shouldn’t drill and plan? Of course not. Does that mean we shouldn’t ask for more money to drill and plan, including stockpiling supplies and trained healthcare workers? No. It simply means that any planning has to be flexible enough to react to the unknown – because it’s virtually impossible to be proactive here and in predicting the type of pandemic. Today we’re planning for bird flu. Tomorrow? Mutated Legionella from a contaminated bottled water supply? It may sound unrealistic but then even the events of 9/11 seemed outlandish to Hollywood.

The blinders should be off; the possibilities as endless as our imaginations, twisted or not.

Pandemic readiness shouldn’t be written off as a Chicken Little mentality; nor should it be an excuse to play chicken. Because unlike management and political policy, if you ignore this it won’t go away.