Clark County officials outline database to track victims during mass casualty incidents in AB 50 hearing

Clark County officials described Assembly Bill 50 to the Assembly Committee on Government Affairs as a statutory framework to support an electronic database the county developed to track and reunify victims during mass casualty incidents.

Ashley Kennedy, principal management analyst for Clark County, said the county spent five years developing the Impacted Persons Database after the October 1, 2017, Route 91 Festival mass shooting revealed shortcomings in victim tracking and family reunification. Kennedy described the bill’s aim: "modernize what is currently a manual and fragmented process by using technology to ensure all responders…are operating with the same real time information."

Clark County Fire Chief Billy Samuels and Misty Richardson, assistant emergency manager, described operational problems they faced during the Route 91 response: long waits at the family assistance center, multiple unlabelled phones and slow identification processes. Samuels said responders and families were sometimes unable to answer where a loved one was: "I want you to put yourself on my end when people were calling us either from New York or Korea ... And it's horrible to say, I don't know." Richardson recounted a child who waited about 16 hours before her mother’s whereabouts were confirmed and said hospitals and responders had been forced to revert to pen‑and‑paper intake during the incident.

County staff said the database was built with multi‑jurisdictional input (law enforcement missing‑persons units, coroner, hospitals, Southern Nevada Health District and county IT). They told the committee the system is permission‑based and HIPAA‑ and HL7‑compliant. Kennedy described a proposed amendment that would set protections and clarify that collected information is deleted after victims are identified and reunified unless individuals opt in to long‑term services; staff called the opt‑in case management portion a separate, voluntary process for ongoing victim assistance.

The bill would require counties to create an electronic victim tracking database if they choose to and would require hospitals or emergency medical centers receiving victims of a qualifying mass casualty incident to report minimal necessary patient information to the database as soon as possible and no later than 24 hours after arrival. Sponsors said reporting requirements follow HIPAA's "minimum necessary" principle and that hospitals would be immune from civil liability for good‑faith reporting; penalties for nonreporting were removed in the conceptual amendment. The draft also redefines "mass casualty incident" in the bill to mean an event causing at least three casualties that overwhelms local emergency response resources and requires a surge response.

Supporters — including the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Southern Nevada Health District, the Resiliency and Justice Center, the City of Henderson and several county emergency managers and professional associations — said the statute would provide important information sharing for reunification, consular notification for foreign nationals and long‑term case management referrals. Teneille Pereira, director of the Resiliency and Justice Center, called the proposal "trauma informed" and emphasized that survivors should not be forced to repeat their stories: "This allows us to capture that immediately for people that want help."

The Nevada Hospital Association said it was technically opposed pending review of the conceptual amendment but praised the cooperative process and indicated it wished to continue working with county staff. No formal committee vote was recorded during the hearing. Clark County offered a public demonstration of the database for legislators and staff.