Citation

Hauenstein L, Gao T, White DM. AMIA Annu. Symp. Proc. 2006; 2006: 944.

Affiliation

Johns Hopkins University, bldg 17-s689, Laurel, MD 20723, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, American Medical Informatics Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

17238563

PMCID

PMC1839651

Abstract

This paper describes a service-oriented architecture being developed that uses a shared data model of the disaster scenario to support the exchange of data between heterogeneous systems. This architecture is employed in the Advanced Health and Disaster Aid Network (AID-N) system to create interoperability between existing emergency response information technologies used in the Washington DC Metropolitan region. Next, we discuss our integration of three disparate systems into AID-N: a pre-hospital patient care reporting software system (MICHAELS), a syndromic surveillance system (ESSENCE), and a hazardous material reference software system (WISER).BACKGROUNDMass casualty events present a dynamic and complicated situation from an informational standpoint. New technology simplifies, automates, and digitizes the collection of data - for example, wearable patient vital-sign monitoring sensors are being developed that can wirelessly share their collected data. Fully distributing the generated data is difficult, though, since multiple heterogeneous parties may want to receive information from these data generating tools in different ways.IMPLEMENTATION: The AID-N project is developing a system to model disaster response scenarios within a descriptive and robust database structure. Individual tools interact with the shared data models through a set of publicly available and descriptive web services that operate on top of the widely-supported Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). A data-generating tool need only send one copy of its data to the shared model using a supplied web service. All other tools may then retrieve this data using the web service that best fits their needs. Our system does not require the client to use heavyweight software libraries or locally-housed databases - a practice commonly dictated by other disaster modeling systems. Our system will enhance the quality of a disaster response by providing lightweight and publicly-available web services to the clients that greatly simplify the sharing and consuming of data with other interested parties.

Language: en