Evaluation of an App-based Mobile Triage System for Mass Casualty Incidents: Within-Subjects Experimental Study (Preprint)

Digitalization of disaster medicine has great potential to accelerate rescue operations and, consequently, to save lives. Mass casualty incidents require fast and precise information management to coordinate effective responses. Currently, first responders manually write triage results on patient cards and brief information is communicated to the command post using radiocommunication. Although widely used in practice, this process implies several time-consuming and error-prone tasks. To address these issues, we designed, implemented, and evaluated an App-based mobile triage system. Within the system, the user can document responder details, triage categories, injury patterns, GPS location among other important information and transmit them automatically to the incident commanders.