Each year the American Red Cross responds to more than 67,000 local and national disasters, such as house fires, floods, storms, forest fires, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks. The Disaster Health Services team of the Red Cross is responsible for meeting the health care needs of disaster victims. The team's volunteer nurses are specifically responsible for assessing the immediate health care needs of the victims and connecting them with appropriate assistance (e.g. replacement of medications or medical equipment). In these crisis situations, immediate access to complete, reliable information regarding the location and availability of health services and products within the affected community is critical. Yet, this key local information is often not complete, easily accessible, or reliable. The goal of the proposed project is to develop, deploy, and evaluate the Crisis Nursing Resource (CNR) information system that provides Red Cross Disaster Health Services' nurses in the field with instantaneous access to high quality community health resource information during times of disaster. The project investigators have already produced a prototype, proof-of-concept information resource that when fully implemented would significantly improve access to comprehensive community health resource information. It complements the Disaster Services Technology Integration Program recently initiated by the Red Cross.
The specific aims or objectives of the CNR information system are: 1) to design a database that maintains the appropriate national and community health resource information that can be easily queried, and to provide links to the National Library of Medicine resources; 2) to develop training curricula, to train personnel to enter, populate and maintain local community resource data, and to query the database that is to be downloaded to personal digital assistants for accessing the information in the field; 3) to develop the technical infrastructure necessary to support nationwide access to the database via the Internet, even when power and communication systems are not available in a community affected by a disaster; 4) to field test the CNR information system and to assess the feasibility of national deployment; and 5) to establish at Miami University the Resource Data Center for Community Disaster Intervention to manage the system and to foster research. CNR is a user-oriented system designed and tested by users for users.
| Troy, Douglas A; Carson, Anne; Vanderbeek, Jean et al. (2008) Enhancing community-based disaster preparedness with information technology. Disasters 32:149-65 |
| Vanderbeek, Jean; Carson, Anne; Troy, Douglas (2008) Evolution of a collaborative model between nursing and computer science faculty and a community service organization to develop an information system. Comput Inform Nurs 26:215-20 |
