Summary: With increasingly frequent disasters, including public health emergencies and mass casualty events, impacting and disrupting usual practice, disaster preparedness and response competency are critical for hospital and prehospital clinicians, support staff, and administrators, most of whom lack formal disaster training. Clinical event debriefing (CED), often referred to as hot wash, cold wash, and after-action reporting by disaster and military professionals, is a valuable quality improvement (QI) tool for improving disaster management. Artificial intelligence (AI) can inform disaster-specific content not only for post-event debriefing, but also to guide and optimize preparedness and response before, during, and after a disaster. Disaster experts and WADEM, as an association, play crucial roles in establishing AI best practices and educating individuals, including those without formal disaster training, on opportunities, challenges, strategies, and effective prompts for using AI to optimize disaster-specific patient management, healthcare system utilization, and provider well-being. This session will address considerations for the use of AI for: 1. Identifying disaster-specific, clinical setting-specific, and patient-specific topics, including activation, staff, space, stuff, processes and workflows, triage, tracking, decontamination, infection control, evaluation and management of specific patients and groups of patients, disposition, reunification, ethical/legal considerations, roles, and team building across professions and specialties. 2. Creating debriefing scripts before CED and using video capture and analysis of events to identify debriefing considerations and topics for hot and cold debriefs based on actual clinical events. 3. Generating debriefing reports and strategies to convert actionable items into actions. 4. Collecting, analyzing, and using data, including in real-time to dynamically guide disaster clinical decision support and allocation of healthcare system resources, and to create just-in-time educational resources. As AI continues to evolve and opportunities for use and continues to expand within and beyond healthcare, AI will no doubt optimize management across all phases of disaster.
Debra Weiner (Sun,) studied this question.