Novel approach for automating medical emergency protocol in military environment

HTA-based modeling study of the process of medical transport tasks in high-speed health trains

BACKGROUND

High-speed health trains are important tools and guarantees in major accidents, epidemic pandemics, disasters, and warfare health care, and the health trains currently developed for common train platforms have more functional defects.

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between the medical transfer system and the medical system, and to obtain a better medical transfer train formation through the established model.

METHODS

Based on the case study of medical transport tools, this paper analyzes the components and interrelationships of the medical transport system and the medical system, and then analyzes the medical transport task process of the health train by using the hierarchical task analysis (HTA) method. Combined with the Chinese standard EMU, a medical transport task model of the high-speed health train is established. Through this model, the functional compartment unit of the high-speed health train and the marshaling scheme of the high-speed health train are obtained.

RESULTS

The expert system is used to evaluate the scheme. The results show that the train formation scheme formulated by the model in this paper is superior to other train formation schemes in three indicators, meeting the requirements of large medical transfer tasks.

CONCLUSION

The results of this study can improve the ability of on-site treatment of patients, and can provide a basis for the research and development of a high-speed health train, which has a certain practical application value.

Telemedicine Use in Disasters: A Scoping Review

Disasters have many deleterious effects and are becoming more frequent. From a health-care perspective, disasters may cause periods of stress for hospitals and health-care systems. Telemedicine is a rapidly growing technology that has been used to improve access to health-care during disasters. Telemedicine applied in disasters is referred to as disaster telemedicine. Our objective was to conduct a scoping literature review on current use of disaster telemedicine to develop recommendations addressing the most common barriers to implementation of a telemedicine system for regional disaster health response in the United States. Publications on telemedicine in disasters were collected from online databases. This included both publications in English and those translated into English. Predesigned inclusion/exclusion criteria and a PRISMA flow diagram were applied. The PRISMA flow diagram was used on the basis that it would help streamline the available literature. Literature that met the criteria was scored by 2 reviewers who rated relevance to commonly identified disaster telemedicine implementation barriers, as well as how disaster telemedicine systems were implemented. We also identified other frequently mentioned themes and briefly summarized recommendations for those topics. Literature scoring resulted in the following topics: telemedicine usage (42 publications), system design and operating models (43 publications), as well as difficulties with credentialing (5 publications), licensure (6 publications), liability (4 publications), reimbursement (5 publications), and technology (24 publications). Recommendations from each category were qualitatively summarized.

Technologies Enabling Situational Awareness During Disaster Response: A Systematic Review

Situational awareness (SA) is critical to mobilizing a rapid, efficient, and effective response to disasters. Limited by time and resources, response agencies must make decisions about rapidly evolving situations, which requires the collection, analysis, and sharing of actionable information across a complex landscape. Emerging technologies, if appropriately applied, can enhance SA and enable responders to make quicker, more accurate decisions. The aim of this systematic review is to identify technologies that can improve SA and assist decision-making across the United States Government and the domestic and international agencies they support during disaster response operations. A total of 1459 articles and 36 after-action reports were identified during literature searches. Following the removal of duplicates and application of inclusion/exclusion criteria, 302 articles and after-action reports were included in the review. Our findings suggest SA is constrained primarily due to unreliable and significantly delayed communications, time-intensive data analysis and visualization, and a lack of interoperable sensor networks and other capabilities providing data to shared platforms. Many of these challenges could be addressed by existing technologies. Bridging the divide between research and development efforts and the operational needs of response agencies should be prioritized.