As in other branches of medicine, disaster medicine needs a scientific basis. A disaster medical response is only as good as the assumptions on which it is based. Many of these assumptions are incorrect and/or are not based on systematically collected evidence. Although guidelines for evaluation and research on health disaster management and guidelines for reports on health crises and critical health events have been published, no uniform template for collecting empirical data on medical care response in disaster situations have been published.

An EMDM Academy Consensus Group was established representing several disaster medicine research centers, the disaster medicine section of the European Society for Emergency Medicine (EuSEM), the World Association for Disaster and Emergency Medicine (WADEM), and the World Health Organization WHO. The Consensus Group decided to limit the project to the acute medical care response. The project was organized around a series of workshops, which created a forum for the presentation, analysis, and listing of descriptors (variables) and their indicators relevant for the disaster medical response. An adapted Delphi method and the Utstein-style method were used to reach consensus on the descriptors and indicators.

A uniform template of describing pre-event, event, medical response and outcome variables and their indicators relevant for evaluation and research on the disaster medical response have been developed, including the agreement on standard definitions.

A uniform reporting template and method are essential to gather empirical data on disaster medical response management in order to establish robust databases allowing disaster medical response investigators and researchers to collect evidence that will impact on response outcomes and provide best practice.