Satellites Contribute To Improved Readiness Overall

 

The lessons of recent natural disasters around the globe are not likely to be forgotten soon, and people need to be reassured that in the event of any large-scale natural or man-made disaster, adequate medical resources and a well-coordinated cadre of personnel will be on scene rapidly. In part due to difficulties in the wake of some of these disasters, there is a growing recognition of the importance of satellite technology in supporting any surge medical response component.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Preparedness and Emergency Operations Office is the medical response arm of the federal government, although its relies on other agencies for the primary response, says Dr. Kevin Yeskey, the office’s acting director. U.S. Northern Command and National Guard civil support teams on scene and all federal government mass casualty medical response teams have access to any mobile and portable or modular satellite assets under the control of local agencies, their own satellite communications equipment and those operated by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), such as the Mobile Emergency Response Support and Mobile Air Transportable Telecommunications System. The Emergency Operations Office also has satellite phones that can be deployed for use by senior officials and incident response coordination teams.

The Emergency Operations Office operates under the Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), which was created when Congress passed the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act in December. Congress approved more than $800 million to fund public health preparedness, emergency medical response and other programs. ASPR also includes the National Disaster Medical System and the National Hospital Bioterrorism Preparedness Program.

FEMA also sustains a large supply of communications equipment, known as the National Cache, for tactical communications support during a disaster, says a FEMA spokeswoman, The equipment, also available to state and local entities, includes 400 Iridium and 260 Inmarsat M-4 satellite phones as well as with 300 Inmarsat Broadband Global Area Network terminals in addition to a large quantity of Motorola UHF handheld radios and several portable QualComm cellular systems.

In addition, at the U.S. Department of Defense, the Office of Force Health Protection and Readiness, the U.S. Army Medical Command and the Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center are looking to enhance the role of satellite in everything from collecting patient data to managing and communicating medical information and performing robotic surgery. Satellite links support the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center’s Special Medical Augmentation Response Team Medical Command Control Communications-Telemedicine kit, for example, and enable other forms of remote battlefield telemedicine including a wireless PDA known as the Battlefield Medical Information System Tactical. During the Strong Angel 3 disaster relief exercise conducted in summer 2006 in California, the satellite-equipped Loma Linda University Medical Center Mobile Telemedicine Vehicle supported 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 digital 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 fundamentally 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 component 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.”

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