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Crossing the Finish Line With Juvare Solutions

Long-Term Partnership at the Boston Marathon Continues, Using WebEOC, EMTrack

The stakes are always high when incident managers are working to assure the safety of the general public. This is especially true at a major public sporting event like the 123rd running of the Boston Marathon.

At the world’s oldest annual marathon, the sixth largest such event in the world, over 30,000 participants striving for athletic excellence don’t need the extra pressure of concerning themselves with what goes on behind the scenes; but they should find it comforting that there are many incident management professionals also simultaneously striving for excellence in keeping people safe with support from Juvare.

In an event with so many participants and spectators, which winds through Boston area streets for 26.2 miles, a multitude of elements come into play, not only public health and safety, but also monitoring traffic and street closures, weather, threats of violence, and more.

Again this year, Juvare solutions including WebEOC, EMTrack and CORES RMS were an integral part of event preparation and response during the event, used by multiple state and local agency partners.

The Multi-Faceted WebEOC

As in many major events (including Super Bowl LIII), WebEOC was used extensively – both to coordinate information sharing among stakeholders as well as in health and medical capacity to coordinate hospital services. In particular, WebEOC was utilized to communicate the status of medical facilities and first aid stations along the race route to the hospitals and medical centers in the greater Boston area. WebEOC also served as a proxy to communicate EMTrack situational awareness, via the City of Boston for instance, to various stakeholders within the metro area.

EMTrack, which has been used during the Boston Marathon for more than a decade, was a key solution as well, and was used to track runners exiting or finishing the race with medical concerns and helped coordinate between first aid stations, EMS and hospitals. EMTrack was also the core technology to facilitate family reunification for the event. CORES RMS was on hand as a contingency to help locate, notify and track volunteers if needed.

Juvare’s People and Hands-on Support Make the Difference

Juvare also had “boots on the ground” throughout the event, offering expert support wherever necessary to help incident management personnel do their job by using Juvare’s technology most efficiently and effectively.

Max Wippich, director of Client Experience at Juvare, watched thousands cross the finish line while giving support at one of the medical stations. Giedrius Meskauskas, EMTrack Product Owner also served in a similar advisory role in the  Emergency Operations Center.

“We both served in a consultative and advisory role to the event – monitoring, basic training, support, guidance, and on the finish line probably actually tracking patients since it’s absolute chaos.”

Both Max and Giedrius said they received extremely positive response about Juvare’s technology from many of the stakeholders during the marathon. Also working closely with agency partners was Juvare Client Success Manager Jane Hurchalla, who was on hand in the Boston EOC.

“It was a great day in Boston yesterday, and a great day for WebEOC,” she said.

Jane said WebEOC was used for situational awareness and to feed the Common Operating Picture and was also a big consumer of EMTrack statistics.

“Despite rain storms and lighting and an occasional traffic light taken out by lighting, from the EOC perspective the day went very smoothly overall,” she said. “Most fortunately, the 10-year-old that went missing was safely returned to her family.”

Jane added that Boston officials were especially pleased with the flexibility of the Juvare solutions being used, particularly with being able to add items to the ESRI dashboard, including the number of runners and the stats from EMTrack such as Medical Patients and Current Patients.

All in all, the 2019 Boston Marathon turned out to be great day for everyone involved – runners, organizers, the City of Boston and Juvare – as everyone successfully and safely crossed the finish line together.

Written by

Akshay Birla

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