How information aids disaster recovery
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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No-one who saw the television pictures of the tsunami striking the coast of Japan could feel anything other than shock and sympathy for the people affected, coupled probably with a strong desire to help. In practice the help most of us can offer is limited to donations – but the information industry is starting to help in more direct ways.

Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer are currently both offering Japan temporary free access to health information resources. Elsevier is providing its online clinical reference tools MD Consult and MD First Consult free throughout April to all IPs originating from Japan, and the Wolters Kluwer Health Emergency Resources Portal provided emergency, disaster, trauma and radiation contamination resources free to Japanese hospitals and healthcare institutions for 30 days from 24 March.

Elsevier has also participated in the Emergency Access Initiative (EAI), a partnership of the National Library of Medicine, the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, the Association of American Publishers and others to provide temporary free access to biomedicine titles in the wake of disasters. Conceived following the 9/11 attacks, its first real use was in response to the Haiti earthquake – and Wolters Kluwer also made resources available from its UpToDate clinical decision support system in both Haiti and New Zealand as well as Japan.

Just a few years ago – at the time of the 1995 Kobe earthquake, say – providing database access would have seemed a pretty low priority compared with medicines, shelter and clean water, if only because the infrastructure wasn’t sufficiently advanced to adequately support such help. And even in 2011, IDG reported that television, rather than the internet, remained the primary source of information on the unfolding disaster for most Japanese.

But wherever science, technology and medicine go, business can be expected as well. So Dun & Bradstreet is also offering a free resource: a search tool that allows individuals to identify companies located in the prefectures impacted by the disaster and assess their exposure to financial and business continuity risk.

Any disquiet at this openly business-orientated initiative compared with the obviously desirable free access to health information resources perhaps needs to be tempered. Although the genuine desire of health information providers to help is not in any doubt, it is also true that the releases announcing their initiatives included promotions of their products – so there is commercial opportunity there as well.

And in any case, once the healing process has begun, the desire to be back in business again is strong. A friend of ours who was holidaying in Thailand when the 2004 Asian tsunami stuck reported that, even while the clearing up was still underway, local people’s overriding concern was to get their shattered shops open again.

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