Red Cross Austria
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On site WLAN enabled disaster management
As explained by the developer(s) in charge.

The Red Cross office in Innsbruck is responsible for rescue-service, desaster-recovery and special treatment at mass-injuries for the central part of Tyrol.

One problem in handling a large number of patients (f.ex. after a coach-accident where you often get more than 50 patients at once) is coordinating and documenting the way a patient takes throug our desaster-recovery-structures, we set up directly at the place of the accident. In the Moment most of it is done by radio-communication.

This has several disadvantages:

- The spelling of the names is often wrong

- When we get requests about the status of a patient (f.ex. when searching the spouse of someone in the coach) the unknown pronounciation of names makes it impossible to find them

- When briefing the media-guys they want statistic data (f.ex. how many people where on that coach, how many are injured)

At the moment this is not possible, cause most of the information is just written down on a piece of paper somewhere out on site. So we wrote a little php-app to test the use of laptops on site. This worked quite good, but is not flexible enough for all the things we want to do and the effort of securing the patient-data is to high.

From the local gouverment we got some special laptops for outdoor use and the necessary WLAN-Equipment. Now I should write the necessary applications for this purpose. It will consist of a server in our radio-control-station-car possibly cconnected to the internet by WLAN or UMTS, some field-laptops connected by special WLAN-Antennas.

The application will provide possibilities for entering all necessary personal data of the patient, documenting all treatment and the way through our desaster-recovery-structures from the point the person is found to the hospital he is delivered to.