Data Interoperability

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Katrina Lessons Learned

"Although Federal, State, and local agencies had communications plans and assets in place, these plans and assets were neither sufficient nor adequately integrated to respond effectively to the disaster..."

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SAFECOM is managed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate's Office for Interoperability and Compatibility (OIC).

THE CASE FOR DATA EXCHANGE

During the 2003 SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) outbreak in Toronto, first responders and emergency medical personnel learned of the outbreak through the media, not from public health, hospitals or other medical organizations.

During the Oklahoma City bombing incident, responders lacked important information needed to understand damage from the blast and where victims might be found. According to the former Assistant Chief of the Oklahoma City Fire Department, it would have been useful to have blueprints, personnel lists and data estimating blast effects and impacts to the buildings early in the response process. According to the Police Department Final Report, this situation highlighted the need for electronic data links between emergency agencies and the need to extend data access into the field.

On January 6, 2005 at 2:40 AM, two freight trains collided in Graniteville, South Carolina, releasing an estimated 11,500 gallons of chlorine gas. Two hours later, the public information director was asked to issue a federal Emergency Alert System (EAS) warning. The director used the telephone to issue the warning to radio and TV stations, but he could not be certain it actually reached anyone. A better, more coordinated public warning system could have helped.

The E-Safety Vision, if implemented, would have solved many of the communications problems experienced in Toronto, Oklahoma City and Graniteville, SC.

During the SARS outbreak, public health officials could have easily routed standard messages to the right agency destinations, without needing to know their electronic addresses.

In Oklahoma City, requests for blueprints, personnel listings, and bomb effects could have been issued as soon as dispatch was notified of the bombing. Responders would have had the information they needed when they arrived at the scene.

The South Carolina Emergency Management Division, after running a plume model based on wind direction for the chlorine gas spill, could have easily targeted and routed messages to the appropriate emergency personnel, radio and televisions stations, and other disparate public alerting mechanisms without making telephone calls.

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Path to Interoperability White Paper

Emergencies responders demand real-time data, yet in an era when technology can bring news, current events, and entertainment to the farthest reaches of the world, many emergency response agencies cannot share data with one another — even within the same jurisdiction. Most of today’s efforts to improve interoperability focus on wireless voice communications. Led by state and local public safety experts and supported by the Department of Homeland Security SAFECOM program, wireless voice interoperability is moving forward. While voice or radio interoperability is a critical need for responders at the scene, it represents only one side of the interoperability equation.

THE NEED

The National Incident Management System (NIMS) calls for an interoperable emergency data communications system linking emergency agencies – not just individual first responders - at all levels of government with other emergency agencies, with the private sector and with nongovernmental organizations. It is simply impossible to achieve the NIMS requirements for Communications and Information Management (Chapter 5) without interoperable, interagency data communications. Yet today there are more than 100,000 emergency response agencies and the vast majority of them are not able to rapidly, accurately and easily communicate data with each other, much less the public. Except at the highest levels of government (e.g. state Emergency Operation Centers with DHS), there is no regional or national emergency data communications capability. In simple terms, the president, the secretary of Homeland Security, the governor, or the EOC of any state do not have the ability to send or receive secure emergency messages to most of the more than 100,000 emergency agencies in our country or those in a particular state. This is a critical homeland security and emergency response problem.

The solution is not for the federal government to buy a new “national emergency network,” or to achieve “interoperability” by buying a single software tool for the vast number of emergency agencies (layering it over existing disparate systems). Nor does the solution need to be a multi-billion dollar, decade-long challenge. Through a coalition of practitioners, great strides can be made.

COMCARE’S APPROACH

In designing a data interoperability environment, COMCARE advocates practitioner-based processes and consensus agreement across multiple domains. This methodology combined with scenario-driven demonstrations consistently produces results that are practical, encourage collaboration across professions and accelerate adoption and use.

During the National Mayday Readiness Initiative (NMRI), practitioners began thinking about sharing data with other organizations and the seeds for a data interoperable framework were born. Called the E-SAFETY Vision, this framework has been refined over time to include five basic high-level components that can guide the implementation of a data interoperable architecture in a community. These components include: transport, data standards, facilitation services, agency applications, and policies and protocols.

During NMRI, practitioners asked, “If we want to send data messages, how can we know to whom and to where information should flow?” One answer was a shared national routing directory, now called the Emergency Provider Access Directory (EPAD). From NMRI ideation came a prototype used in numerous demonstrations and a detailed design that can be used to build a production version of the directory.

To ensure that data exchanges could be understood, practitioners knew that data standards would need to be developed. COMCARE embraced this idea, promoted it, facilitated and participated in numerous standards development efforts. These efforts resulted in the creation of the Vehicular Emergency Data Set (VEDS), the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), and the suite of Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) standards.

Realizing that few agencies currently had the ability to send and receive these types of data standards, COMCARE commissioned the development of a prototype messaging system. Called EPAD Connect, this system provides agencies with the ability to utilize both the EPAD routing directory and data standards to communicate with other organizations without having to know who they are, what they need, or how to communicate with them.

While COMCARE believes that agencies should be able to select the applications that best meets their needs, it also wants to ensure that agencies are positioned for data interoperability and has launched and participated in projects that guide the procurement of these software systems. Recently, COMCARE launched the Integrated Patient Tracking Initiative and formed three working groups to define a list of requirements for the procurement and deployment of these systems.

A data interoperability enabled architecture is critical to effective information sharing. However, that doesn’t mean that the architecture can invite uncontrolled use or can be unaccountable for actions preformed within the architecture. If the environment is not trusted, then its effectiveness is limited. COMCARE advocates the development of clear enterprise guidelines for the handling, distribution, and accuracy of data and information. These policies and protocols, the fifth architectural component, will determine what is permitted and what is not permitted. They will determine who and which agencies have the authority to perform certain actions or view certain types of information. These policies, protocols, and operating rules will be housed and enforced through a number of facilitation services. Identity Rights Management, an EPAD companion module, provides authentication, authorization, role-based access control and auditing capabilities for the environment. Other facilitation services, like digital rights management, will protect the shared information by enforcing access rules determined by the originator of the information as well as federal guidelines regarding privacy and copyright protection.

FROM VISION TO REALITY

COMCARE continues to work with the emergency response community to promote and implement data interoperability. Through the National Emergency Alerting and Response Systems (NEARS) Initiative, COMCARE, along with a growing and diverse coalition of emergency response and industry organizations, plans to implement the E-Safety Vision in select regions throughout the country.

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