The OASIS Emergency Management Technical Committee has approved the Emergency Data Exchange Language (EDXL) Hospital AVailability Exchange (HAVE) 1.0 as a Committee Draft and submitted the package for public review. This is an open invitation to comment. We strongly encourage feedback from potential users, developers and others, whether OASIS members or not, for the sake of improving the interoperability and quality of OASIS work. The public review ends 18 December 2007.

The EDXL Distribution Element (DE) specification describes a standard message distribution framework for data sharing among emergency information systems using the XML-based EDXL. This format may be used over any data transmission system, including but not limited to the SOAP HTTP binding. EDXL-HAVE specifies an EDXL-based XML document format that allows the communication of the status of a hospital, its services, and its resources. These include bed capacity and availability, emergency department status, available service coverage, and the status of a hospital's facility and operations. This format may be used over any data transmission system, including but not limited to the SOAP HTTP binding. In a disaster or emergency situation, there is a need for hospitals to be able to communicate with each other, and with other members of the emergency response community. The ability to exchange data in regard to hospitals' bed availability, status, services, and capacity enables both hospitals and other emergency agencies to respond to emergencies and disaster situations with greater efficiency and speed. In particular, it will allow emergency dispatchers and managers to make sound logistics decisions -- where to route victims, which hospitals have the ability to provide the needed service. Many hospitals have expressed the need for, and indeed are currently using, commercial or self-developed information technology that allows them to publish this information to other hospitals in a region, as well as EOCs, 9-1-1 centers, and EMS responders via a Web-based tool. Systems that are available today do not record or present data in a standardized format, creating a serious barrier to data sharing between hospitals and emergency response groups. Without data standards, parties of various kinds are unable to view data from hospitals in a state or region that use a different system -- unless a specialized interface is developed.

See the full public review announcement.