A Proposed Emergency Management Framework: Lessons Learned, Principles & Opportunities

This paper proposes a modern emergency management framework for demonstration, education, and validation of effective and efficient management and sharing of emergency information to save lives through interoperability and standardization. Recently, HL7 and OASIS have collaborated on key standards, including the Tracking of Emergency Patients (TEP), Hospital Availability (HAVE) and the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), which offer a real opportunity to improve emergency information distribution to save lives, if only there were a standard for effectively distributing this information using smart systems to those who need it based on their skills, roles and relationships. There are two missing pieces to enable this distribution system. The first missing piece is a standardized way to package and smartly route emergency information, e.g. by role or geographic area. Fortunately, OASIS has just such a standard, the Distribution Element (DE). The second missing piece is an emergency management framework (EMF) consisting of (1) a set of emergency standards for information exchange, e.g. OASIS EDXL, HL7; (2) an open-source software library with a set of standardized APIs for developers to use in their systems to interact with these standards; and (3) a sample reference implementation for demonstrating, educating, and validating the effective and efficient management and distribution of emergency information. Now is the time to revisit the Distribution Element and enable the open-source initiative to provide the needed software libraries and reference implementation leveraging modern software advances. The authors recommend a collaborative, standards-based, open-source development process to include updating and modernizing the OASIS Distribution Element and building the EMF.