Along with the rapid development of industrial and commercial industries, the extent of disasters in Kaohsiung city in recent years due to highly concentrated population, newly erected skyscrapers and factories is far beyond one's imagination. By using the Kaohsiung Emergency Operation Center (KEOC) as an example, this study investigates practical operations, including disaster prevention, disaster emergency action, restoration and reconstruction after disaster, etc., of the emergency operation center at a special municipality level. Methodologies utilized in this study include literature review, direct observation, questionnaire survey, and statistical analysis by using the SPSS software package for Windows (Version 8.0). Main conclusions of this study are summarized as follows: 1. The regional plan for disaster prevention and response needs to be specified. 2. Manpower for disaster prevention and response of Kaohsiung city needs to be increased and the duties need to be specified. 3. Budgets for disaster prevention and response need to be prepared liberally. More equipments and devices for disaster prevention and response need to be purchased. 4. Personnel training, exercise and teamwork/cooperation for disaster prevention and response should be conducted seriously. 5. Persuade the public that prevention is better than rescue. 6. Actions for disaster prevention and response should be incorporated into the local communities. 7. Modern emergency operation centers need to be well constructed. 8. Data for disaster prevention and response need to be integrated and processed into useful information. 9. Set up standard operating procedures (SOP) for disaster rescue and crisis management. 10. Integration and utilization of volunteers for disaster prevention and response need to be institutionalized. 11. Task schedules need to be well controlled, supervised, and checked. Recommendations from this study are summarized as follows: 1. Set up short, medium, and long-term objectives properly for disaster prevention and response. 2. Set up a duty-oriented unit for disaster prevention and response according to the law. 3. It is more appropriate than the current organizational system to combine the KEOC and Rescue Command Center, Fire Bureau into one task force and fulfill the services at one site. 4. It is recommended that Kaohsiung city government should actively pursue the establishment of the Southern Stand-by Supporting Unit, Central Emergency Operation Center in Kaohsiung city . 5. Amend related laws and regulations for disaster prevention and response as soon as possible. All recommendations mentioned above provide not only Kaohsiung city, but other counties and cities as well, with valuable references pertaining to establishing and operating the most efficient emergency operation center.

Emergency response is a time critical work that needs team work from different organizations with various specialties. It also needs to integrate existing information system to collect and assemble necessary knowledge and resources for critical emerging tasks and use it to plan for collaborative problem solving In this study, we propose the methodology to automate the traditional emergency patient transfer process by connecting different organization¡¦s information systems through Web services with BPEL4WS. Via Web services, the medical resources information can be requested according to patient conditions, and resource reservation decision can be made online. Via BPEL4WS, heterogeneous information systems in different organizations can be connected and executed automatically in any predefined process without limit human intervention. The willingness of hospitals to share various levels of resource availability information to Emergency Operation Center (EOC) to coordinate regional medical resource distribution is critical to make Web service platform work. Therefore, this study examines the correlation of individual hospitals¡¦ performance in terms of resource utilization with hospital¡¦s information sharing with EOC. We investigate the effects from sharing information to EOC which adopts three policies of releasing hospital status information through simulation under different conditions in emergency occurrence and occupied hospital resources. Our findings from the simulations imply that the best policy for EOC to adopt in order to make Web services workable in handling medical emergency is to accord different conditions to adopt different suitable policies. For hospitals, if they want to get the maximum resources utilization, it had better to refer to different condition to adopt different information sharing strategies.