A New Information System for the Management of Non-Epidemic Veterinary Emergencies

Simple Summary Veterinary services, along with public health professionals, can be involved in major adverse events resulting from processes of the Earth striking both humans and animals, so-called non-epidemic emergencies. A dedicated information system able to collect specific data and tprovide information to stakeholders is a pre-requisite for the management of these events. The Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale dell'Abruzzo e del Molise "G. Caporale", home of the National Reference Centre for Urban Hygiene and Non-Epidemic Emergencies (IUVENE), has been entrusted with the development of a system that provides different veterinary operational levels with a spatial and decisional tool to assist them in cases of natural disasters. This kind of decision support system is still missing at a national level. The present paper describes the implementation of the Veterinary Information System for Non-Epidemic Emergencies (SIVENE), an innovative, flexible, and user-friendly system and modular tool including a database, web application, mobile app, and Web Geographic Information Systems (GIS) component. SIVENE provides National Veterinary Services (local health units and national and regional veterinary services) with an emergency management tool responding to the needs identified in the context of catastrophic events, thanks to the data maintained within its database and converted into real time information. The Italian National Veterinary Services, public health professionals, and policy makers are asked to participate at different levels in the decision-making process for the management of non-epidemic emergencies. A decision support system offering the different administrative and operational emergency management levels with a spatial and decisional tool to be used in the case of natural disasters is still missing at the national level. Within this context, the Italian General Directorate for Animal Health of the Ministry of Health funded a research project for the implementation of a new Veterinary Information System for Non-Epidemic Emergencies (SIVENE), an innovative real-time decision support tool for emergency response in a disaster management scenario. SIVENE was developed according to a multi-layer architecture with four integrated components: the database layer, which was implemented by an RDBMS Oracle 11 g; the ReST service layer, which was created using J2EE, Spring, and MyBatis technologies; the web application (business framework and user interface), which was developed in Angular4 framework using TypeScript language; and the web Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which was realized through the implementation of a geodatabase in Oracle RDBMS 11 g. This system allows us to build up and dynamically create a set of dedicated checklists to be used in the field when gathering the information needed for the management of non-epidemic emergencies; employ the application on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones; and use the web GIS to manage and visualize data of veterinary interest and territorial maps of risk and damage.