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A Design Pattern for Information Sharing in Medical Emergency Response to CBRNE Events

Authors:
Robert Dourandish

Keywords: CBRNE, Collaborative Emergency Medical Response, Service Oriented Architecture, information Sharing

Abstract:
Responding to large-scale medical emergencies tends to quickly overwhelm a single agency’s recourses and demand multi-jurisdictional response. As the number of responder organizations grows so does the importance and complexity of effective, efficient, and timely information sharing. This is particularly true in the context of operations that may demand collaboration between military and civilian agencies, such as responding to Chemical, Biological, Nuclear, or Explosive (CBRNE) events. With the addition of digital infrastructure and wireless data networks as intrinsic Incident Command tools, a significant barrier to efficient information availability and dissemination is the tiered, multi-domain access paradigm that is typically employed by response agencies, particularly military organizations. While treaty-based response protocols can successfully create digital shared domains, information sharing, particularly in an automated or software-driven fashion, remains exigent. Fundamentally, the challenge belies in the need for heterogeneous system infrastructures and architectures to rapidly fuse in an adhoc fashion, a task that raises wide ranging technical challenges. The cross-domain access mitigation is particularly important in the context of medical information since providing timely care has to be balanced against patient privacy and, in events that may involve biological or nuclear agents, against the best interest of the community at large. Asynchronous Web Services offer a practical solution to the problem of multi-organizational information sharing in the context of time-critical medical emergency response. However, asynchronous operations are not a native component of the W3C standards and while a number of approaches have been suggested, none meet the security and privacy requirements of medical emergency response. This paper describes a design pattern that addresses many challenges of deploying web services in support of information sharing processes across heterogeneous domains in the particular context of the medical component of large-scale multi-jurisdictional emergency response.

Pages: 164 to 168

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2011

Publication date: February 23, 2011

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4359

ISBN: 978-1-61208-119-9

Location: Gosier, Guadeloupe, France

Dates: from February 23, 2011 to February 28, 2011