Humanitarian
organization International Medical Corps has roughly 5,000 field staff working
on about 30 different projects around the world, particularly in Africa, Asia,
Haiti and the Middle East. They occasionally work in the U.S. for events like
Hurricane Katrina. It has headquarters in Los Angeles and offices in London,
Croatia and Washington, D.C. "We respond to anything from civil conflict
to natural disasters," said IMC travel manager Larry Bague, and the
organization sets up a unique risk management strategy for every response
program that goes into the field.
Provider & Proprietary Tracking
To keep track of
travelers, the company uses six travel management companies, based in Croatia,
Dubai, Ethiopia, London, Nairobi and the U.S. Workers traveling to program
sites are strictly required to book travel through these providers. All the
TMCs send itinerary data to travel medical insurance and evacuation provider Medex
Global Solutions. IMC also provides HR data feeds to the TMCs.
Medex provides an
overview map dashboard that indicates where travelers are and who issued the
ticket, and it updates any changed travel plans. To make it easier to track
travelers at the different program sites, IMC's internal IT department uses
Medex's data to create individual dashboards for each program. "Medex
serves different purposes. … It not only tracks where our travelers are, it
also helps enforce our travel policy," Bague said. For instance, Medex can
catch when a flight booked to Beirut will fly over dangerous Syrian airspace or
catch banned airlines that IMC should avoid, Bague explained.
Hybrid Risk-Assessment Model
IMC uses its own
security department's country ratings, as well as Medex's 1-to-5 scale, five
being the highest security threat. It also has two sources to notify the
company of dangerous events: Medex sends automated email alerts, but IMC pulls
in its own feed from personnel on the ground who are monitoring security
situations at every program location.
Technology Upgrades
Before IMC began
using Medex three years ago, it used International SOS. Bague said the process
functioned similarly, though he didn't give a reason for the change. More than
10 years ago, IMC kept track of travelers manually. "We'd get reports from
all the TMCs, but the challenge was tying them all together and then keeping
them live [because] we didn't have real-time or live data. It was pretty rough,"
Bague said. "Now, everything is automated."
In the future, he
would like to be able to track travelers using GPS. "Everybody carries a
cell phone now, so having a simple app to have you track where your movements
are would be a pretty simple solution to track everybody," he said. "The
problem is: You run into a lot of privacy issues, [but] it would help tie all
of our systems together, that's for sure."