Grant: College and Community Innovation Program

Recognizing the need for increased inter-professional communication and data interchange during large and small scale emergency situations, Centennial College developed the Inter-professional Disaster Emergency Action Studies (IDEAS) Network to stage high fidelity emergency and disaster simulations. Since its inception in 2005 the IDEAS Network has completed seven full-scale multi-disciplinary community simulation exercises involving an extensive collaborative network of more than 3,500 students, faculty and public/private sector professionals across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Through participation in these simulation exercises and analysis of the resulting data, the applied research team at the Centennial College Applied Research and Innovation Centre (ARIC) identified a critical need for applied research in several areas of the emergency situation continuum of prevention, response and recovery. ARIC has grounded its applied research program in innovation for health care communication and information technology to address the situational and resource awareness inefficiencies in daily emergencies, as well as during large-scale disasters. The overall goal of the proposed two year Mobilizing Technology Solutions project is to engage with industries in the GTA that focus on the area of health care communication technology and to examine and improve current health care resource management and response applications. The researchers will work with this industry sector to provide innovative solutions through creative approaches to interface design by modeling strategic processes and developing smart technologies to provide timely, accurate and concise data analysis to aid in crisis decision making. The result will provide technology applications that maximize the utilization and deployment of health care resources to allow more intelligent day-to-day situational responses, and to enhance situational resilience so as to decrease the recovery time from critical events.