An Emergency Medical Information System for Mass Gatherings: Design and Implementation

Background: The frequency of mass gatherings is increasing. During mass gatherings, the possibility of terrorist attacks, fires, collective food poisoning and public health emergencies increases, and these incidents can easily lead to a mass casualty incident with a large demand for medical resources. The current medical system has difficulty meeting the demand of massive emergent resources and real-time data interactions while meeting the daily demand.Objective: The aim of this study was to develop an emergency medical system for mass gatherings especially.Methods: We developed an emergency medical information system for mass gatherings. Based on a unified prehospital and intrahospital emergency data exchange protocol, we could directly standardize medical information data and provide data support for the multiple institutions’ evacuation decision support algorithm. By connecting wearable devices, vehicle-mounted devices, video calling systems and surveillance systems to capture real-time scenes.Results: We completed the system construction through mobile applications and online platforms and deployed it in 3 hospitals, 5 ambulances and 17 on-site medical sites. We built a set of electronic medical records covering the whole process of first aid according to the basic principles of first aid. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is suitable for mass gatherings. The overall survival rate of patients can be improved by 3%-8%, and the average evacuation efficiency of patients can be improved by 50%. At the same time, in the real-world environment, the method can ensure the survival rate of patients and show better convergence.Conclusions: The proposed system can solve the problems caused by delayed information communication, unbalanced allocation of medical resources, and a large number and wide distribution of patients.