title: Data quality for situational awareness during mass-casualty events.
abstract: Incident Command systems often achieve situational awareness through manual paper-tracking systems. Such systems often produce high latencies and in-complete data, resulting in inefficient and ineffective resource deployment. WIISARD (Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters) collects much more data than a paper-based system, dramatically reducing latency while increasing the kinds and quality of information available to incident commanders. Yet, the introduction of IT into a disaster setting is not problem-free. Notably, system component failures can delay the delivery of data. The type and extent of a failure can have varying effects on the usefulness of information displays. We describe a small, coherent set of customizble information overlays to address this problem, and we discuss reactions to these displays by medical commanders.
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Diego, La Jolla. CA, USA.
authors.forename: Barry
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Demchak
authors.forename: William G
authors.initials: WG
authors.lastname: Griswold
authors.forename: Leslie A
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Lenert
mesh_terms: D004190:Disasters; D004631:Emergency Medical Service Communication Systems / Q000592:standards*; D004632:Emergency Medical Services / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D007256:Information Systems / Q000592:standards*; D020407:Internet; D011786:Quality Control; D018635:Rescue Work / Q000458:organization & administration; D014584:User-Computer Interface