The Informatics Response in Disaster, Terrorism, and War
- Affiliations of the authors: Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, and Healthvision, Waltham, Massachusetts (JMT); University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (MW); University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland (CM); Office of the Surgeon General, Medical Readiness, Science and Technology, Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, DC (KOS)
- Correspondence and reprint requests: Jonathan M. Teich, MD, PhD, Department of Emergency Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115; e-mail: <jteich{at}harvard.edu>
- Received 12 November 2001
- Accepted 21 November 2001
Abstract
The United States currently faces several new, concurrent large-scale health crises as a result of terrorist activity. In particular, three major health issues have risen sharply in urgency and public consciousness—bioterrorism, the threat of widespread delivery of agents of illness; mass disasters, local events that produce large numbers of casualties and overwhelm the usual capacity of health care delivery systems; and the delivery of optimal health care to remote military field sites. Each of these health issues carries large demands for the collection, analysis, coordination, and distribution of health information. The authors present overviews of these areas and discuss ongoing work efforts of experts in each.
Footnotes
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Dr. Wagner is supported in part by grants GO8 LM06625-01 and T15 LM/DE07059 from the National Library of Medicine, contract 290-00-0009 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality; a contract from the Air Force under the DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Biosurveillance Program; and by cooperative agreement U90/CCU318753-01 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Mackenzie is supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (IIS 9900406), the National Library of Medicine (GNL M000003), and Army Research Institute (DASW01-99-K-0003) and by a contract from the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, Fort Detrick, Maryland (DAMD 17-01-P0827). The projects described in his presentation were performed in collaboration with Dr. Yan Xiao and Peter Fu-Ming Hu.
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The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of granting agencies or the Department of Defense.
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↵* The article is based on a panel presentation given at the 2001 AMIA Annual Symposium in Washington, DC, on Nov 5, 2001. The major contributor for each topic was Dr. Wagner, for biosurveillance and bio-agent detection; Brig. Gen. Schafer, requirements for event identification, signal-to-noise, capacity increase in disasters, and the leaders system; Dr. Mackenzie, coordination of field information, and telemedicine; and Dr. Teich, introduction, recommendations, and conclusions.
