Data management in mass casualty incidents: the e-Triage project

Abstract

The main drawback of paper-based registration systems for organizing mass casualty incidents (MCIs) is that information about affected persons remains among the persons themselves. Data can be duplicated/aggregated by laborious manual copying triage tags only, and the normal medium for exchanging information are voicebased radio systems. Since MCIs normally overwhelm the regularly available rescue resources a particularly effective crisis management has to be applied. Operational command centers and rescue forces need information as fast as possible about type and number of injuries, so that each affected or injured person gets optimal care. This paper gives a general survey of the e-Triage project, in which a coherent overall concept for a MCI data management system is studied.