An interdisciplinary approach to designing a mass casualty incident management system

Efficient emergency management requires on the one hand collecting distributed pieces of information in order to get an aggregated situation overview, and on the other hand distributing and presenting the gathered information to all levels of decision making. IT-supported emergency management systems can support these tasks, but need to be carefully designed in order to reflect the actual needs. Robustness and user-friendliness are obvious key requirements for this area of application, but a thorough understanding of operational procedures is mandatory, too. This paper gives a brief description of the steps taken for the e-Triage research project, in which an IT-supported management system for mass casualty incidents (MCIs) is under development. A specific characteristic of the approach is that not only users as customers and engineers as vendors are involved, but also psychologists focussing on acceptance and ergonomics in terms of stress load caused by the developed solutions.