Software services for supporting remote crisis management

Crisis management specifies a series of functions or processes for the identification, analysis and forecasting of crisis issues, and the statement of specific ways that would enable an organization to prevent or cope with a crisis. There are some existing techniques for crisis management. However, to our knowledge none of them is focused on the integration of telemedicine acts especially during transportation phase and also between health structures for saving more lives. Therefore, we propose a novel methodological framework for remote crisis management with three main phases: (1) Crisis definition (2) Crisis Analysis and (3) Crisis Management. The Crisis Management phase is based on the organized collaboration of various acts of telemedicine: Teleconsultation, Teleexpertise, Telemonitoring, Teleassistance, and Medical regulation. Each act of telemedicine provides services to others and can be represented in Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS design principle considers a software application as a service from which we propose some collaborative services to solve complex crisis management problems. The case studied and modeled concerns the simulation exercise on the Tsunami crisis management in Cannes (France), especially during the transportation phase of patients to various health structures. The proposed methodology adds an additional layer in terms of remote collaboration and information management to improve the management of emergencies and safety, with a view for contributing to protect and save lives when minimizing damages. The expected benefits (main findings) for using the considered approach are not only to provide crisis managers with a relevant computerized decision support system, but also to minimize financial costs, reduce the response time and positively impact the crisis management.