Towards the development of a decision support system for multi-agency decision-making during cross-border emergencies

Abstract

(2016) Towards the development of a decision support system for multi-agency decisionmaking during cross-border emergencies, Journal of Decision Systems, 25:sup1, 381-396, DOI: 10.1080/12460125.2016 ABSTRACTDeveloping decision support systems for emergency situations is a complex and challenging task. These difficulties are compounded further in the case of cross-border emergencies, which often require the coordination and collaboration of independent agencies. These agencies have different structures and resources in place, and follow their own internal policies and procedures. If a number of countries have been affected, agencies may not even share the same language. Large-scale disasters, whether natural, deliberate, or accidental do not respect borders and come with a high risk to human life and a variety of economic and health impacts. Thus, it is the aim of the S-HELP (Securing-Health Emergency Learning Planning) project to develop a decision support tool-set that supports multi-agency decision-making during cross-border emergencies. S-HELP seeks to provide a tool-set that supports rapid and effective decisionmaking across all stages of the emergency management lifecycle (i.e. mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery). To address the challenges associated with multi-agency emergency management, a holistic framed approach to healthcare preparedness, response, and recovery is proposed. This holistic framework has been created to guide the development of the S-HELP solution. The framework integrates a number of components important in the phased iterative development of an emergency management decision support system, such as, interoperability standards, risk communication, spatial data management, agile development, healthcare responder training, and scenario development for system evaluation.

Developing a Transnational Health Record Framework with Level-Specific Interoperability Guidelines Based on a Related Literature Review

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“…Zheng L, et al [27] state ''the techniques to efficiently discover, collect, organize, search, and disseminate real-time disaster information have become national priorities for efficient crisis management and disaster recovery tasks''. It is challenging for the traditional disaster management systems to collect, integrate and process large volumes of data from multiple sources in real-time [28]. Moreover, the constraint of generating results in a small amount of time for emergency rescue and response, growing big data management issues and limited computational power makes the current traditional disaster management inadequate for the efficient and successful application.…”

Collective decision-making for developing emergency management capabilities

“…The author reviewed all 38 publications to check the types of disasters, decision-making models discussed and disaster management factors to identify the research gap (See Table I). Neville et al (2016) discussed collaboration in managing cross-border disasters, especially for public health. However, this discussion was mainly for building an emergency management framework from a holistic perspective, thus did not examine the prioritization of factors.…”