American military officers say, the amassed information on combatants over the last 10 years amounts to the most detailed data ever assembled on battlefield trauma and its care. But the records are scattered, as the Defense Department’s trauma registry has information on roughly 66,000 patients largely – of those who survived, and the Armed Forces Medical Examiner’s Office maintains separate sets of records.
So far these disparate storehouses of information have not been joined in a permanent place, much less made widely available for cross-disciplinary study.
Col. Jeffrey A. Bailey, a surgeon who directs the Joint Trauma System at the Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, confirmed there as yet is no standardized medical database that enables researchers to look back comprehensively on the experiences of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Against this background, Col. Michael D. Wirt, a doctor (a neuroradiologist ) volunteered for duty in an infantry brigade, set out in 2010 to make his own record of one brief but bloody chapter of the Afghan war.
Col. Wirt created a database which could be read like a catalog of horrors. His database is part of a vast store of information recorded about the experiences of American combatants. In it, more than 500 American soldiers are subjected to characteristic forms of violence of the Afghan war. Colonel Wirt was a brigade surgeon from the 101st Airborne Division during the American-led effort in 2010 and 2011 to dislodge the Taliban from their rural stronghold along the Arghandab River. His database was one part official record and one part personal research project.
He was intent on documenting how soldiers were wounded or sickened, how they were treated and how they fared. For those seeking to understand war and how best to survive it, the doctor on his own initiative created an evidence-based tool and a possible model.
“If you don’t take data and analyze it and try to find ways to improve, then what are you doing?” Colonel Wirt asked in an interview at Fort Campbell, where he is a deputy commander at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital. “In my humble opinion, a consolidated database with standardized input consisting of mechanism of injury and resulting wounds, classified by battle and nonbattle injuries, would be something you could actually use.”
Abridged, from an original article by C.J. Chivers, The New York Times, 17/05/2012
Does this report ring a bell? How is this vastly scattered and fragmented battle zone data compared to data from the healthcare industry in Malaysia? How well are we as players in analyzing data we so intently document?