Besides being located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, Indonesia is the largest archipelago country in the world. Some parts of the country are not very accessible. It raises difficulties in controlling and monitoring a disaster response mission remotely in real-time. Muhammadiyah, the Indonesian non-governmental organization (NGO) that has been responding to disaster since 1919, used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for Health Disaster Response (HDR) in the Lombok Earthquake 2018, in cooperation with ESRI Indonesia, as one alternative to disaster response controlling and monitoring.

To show the benefit of using real-time GIS for HDR in an archipelago country.

While responding to the disaster in Lombok, the Muhammadiyah Health Disaster Response Team was collecting data of patient, medication, problem, need, location, and resource with computers and smartphones, inputting the data that was forwarded to the ArcGIS platform. The Health Disaster Response Team coordinator and Muhammadiyah Board monitored and analyzed the health response through the GIS dashboard in Yogyakarta, 652km far from Lombok Island.

Using real-time GIS has been useful for disaster response. It was efficient by cutting flight and other transport costs, connected by the internet, and communicative by graphic and map dashboard. It was a green approach since it was paperless, and analysis-friendly by real-time data compilation and computation.

One of the big gaps in disaster response monitoring seems to be real-time data. Especially in an archipelago country, it is costly, time-consuming, and resource consuming. Daily big data may be frustrating and can become “white paper syndrome.” One of the good approaches to that is GIS Web services although it must be realized that the internet connection in a rural area can be another challenge. It can be solved by in-gadget data memory that can be delivered while the internet connection is available.