The city of Chicago’s Unified Command Vehicle was deployed
during the Chicago Bears’ Jan. 14 playoff game in downtown
Chicago. The technical work area inside the Unified Command
Vehicle provides configuration and access to all of the vehicle’s
core technical systems, including satellite, video broadcast, video
distribution, audio distribution, telephony, intercom, land mobile
radios and computer applications.
University medical Center mobile telemedicine Vehicle sup-
ported the Battlefield medical information System tactical.
the U.S. army also has funded the disaster relief and emergency
medical Services, which is aimed at enhancing communications on
board ambulances and lifeFlight helicopters via satellite-based digi-
tal emergency medical services systems. these allow paramedics and
other medical personnel in the field to establish share telemetry data
and video to emergency room physicians miles away.
Satellite imagery and geographic information system (GiS) data is
growing in importance. it enables medical personnel to see quickly
where medical resources are located in relation to disaster sites.
“disasters and emergency events, regardless of scale, are fundamen-
tally a challenge in getting the right information to the right people at
the right time and in the right format. events have revealed the critical
importance of integrity, compatibility, interoperability, and redundancy
of information systems intercommunications,” says ric Skinner, senior
GiS coordinator at the Baystate Health Geographics program at
Baystate medical Center in Springfield, mass.
timely, accurate and dependable communications, within, between
and among hospitals and other private, commercial and public health
care resources is critical, according to Skinner. “projects like HavBed (a
system designed to track the availability of hospital beds statewide and
regionally) and CommCare alliance’s integrated patient tracking System
recognize the criticality of good communications, including satellite
technology,” he says. “Satellite technology should be an important com-
ponent of every disaster/emergency communications infrastructure so
that incident commanders have the information they need for situational
awareness, decision support and asset tracking including victims, families,
pets and resource allocation.”
planning, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery depend
on accurate and reliable GiS data which often originates with GpS
data. “Satellite data communications can ensure that this critical
data gets from those who collect it to those who need it. the location
of the event, the routing of victims to healthcare facilities, routing of
response resources, tracking of assets and enabling timely recovery
all require geographic intelligence,” says Skinner. “the ability of different entities to communicate with each other on demand and in
real time — interoperability — is a critical success factor in assuring
how well hospital surge capacity can be planned for and provided
for. the needs for alternative and redundant communications to
provide the requisite information systems integrity must be designed
into any communications system.”
