Disaster E-Health: A New Paradigm for Collaborative Healthcare in Disasters

Disaster management and disaster medicine are well-established disciplines for responding to disasters and providing care for individuals whose health and wellbeing has been affected. However, these disciplines have different origins, development, and priorities so that communication and coordination across them during disasters is often lacking, leading to delayed, sub-standard, inappropriate, or even unavailable. Moreover, neither discipline exploits the new range of ehealth technologies such as the electronic health record or telehealth and mobile health that are revolutionizing non-disaster healthcare. We need a new paradigm that applies information and e-health technologies to improve disaster health planning and response. This paper describes the initial stages of a project to develop such a paradigm by scoping and developing the area of disaster e-health.