One thing natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami and the Haitian earthquake have in common is the difficulty of delivering medical care in a chaotic environment where the communications infrastructure on the ground is compromised or completely destroyed.

A remedy is in the wings. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego are currently investigating how to improve the scalability and robustness of the information technology deployed for medical response in disasters.

“Our system will be able to withstand long periods of operation in which devices are cut off from the network,” said William Griswold, a UCSD professor of computer science and engineering. The UCSD system will be operable with a single device or a thousand, permitting a gradual escalation of response.

The new project picks up where the original WIISARD (Wireless Internet Information System for Medical Response in Disasters) project left off. That four-year effort (2004–08) produced a testbed consisting of devices and software for use by first responders and command center personnel dealing with triage and other medical decisions after a disaster. The new system, dubbed WIISARD SAGE (Self-scaling Architecture for Group and Enterprise Computing), will attempt to overcome current problems to allow IT to improve communication and decision-making after major disasters.

New WIISARD SAGE systems emerging include:

• mobile phones equipped with custom software;

• Bluetooth barcode scanners that allow responders to scan a patient’ s paper triage tag to bring up their on-site medical record;

• RFID technology to help track where responders are located at a disaster site; and

• new network protocols, including Grapevine, a protocol that allows communication even if only a few network connections are functioning.

Griswold said WIISARD’s technologies, originally targeted towards multi-agency Metropolitan Medical Strike Teams (MMSTs), are integrated with law enforcement, enabling a much earlier life-saving entry than with the typical multi-stage response.

“However, as part of our research effort, we are redesigning WIISARD for everyday use by local fire departments,” he said. “In this way, agencies are always ready to put WIISARD into service in a disaster, because it is what they use everyday.”

The UCSD researchers will test their solutions with emergency response agencies during large-scale disaster drills in San Diego County. The first one is scheduled for mid-May 2010, under the auspices of the federally funded San Diego MMST.

Griswold said design, implementation, deployment and evaluation should conclude late next year.