On any given day, there can be numerous faculty, staff and students traveling on behalf of their higher education institution and on any given day critical events (active shooter, extreme weather, terrorism, political unrest, etc.) happen all over the world. Risk management offices understand that it’s crucial to know if their travelers are affected by these events, but “time to detect” (TDD) is often overlooked when it comes to being alerted to these critical events. TDD refers to how long after a critical event happens that news of the event filters out and the risk management office is made aware of it.
The office of risk management can only provide an effective response to a critical event if they are aware of it as soon as possible after it occurs. There was a time not too long ago when higher education institutions learned about critical events through the news or word of mouth and that would then compel them to put their duty of care plan into action. However, think about the amount of time that passes from when an event happens and it finally gets reported on the news, or worse yet, by word of mouth. If a traveler is directly affected by a critical event it’s imperative that their institution know as soon as possible. A fast TDD is essential to launching an effective response.
What about critical events that evolve over time? These can be tricky because you may have a traveler that wasn’t affected by the initial event, but whose path may intersect the evolving critical event at a later time. Consider an active shooter situation. Those types of critical events don’t always start and stop in the same location. The initial event may occur at a specific place, but if the subject flees, new critical events may be created along their path. It is imperative that your office of risk management and potentially affected travelers are kept abreast of situations like these with timely intelligence that can help them avoid risks. A slow TDD in developing situations could mean the difference between a traveler having the “heads-up” to be able to avoid a threatening situation or unknowingly putting themselves in harm’s way.
Rapid TDD is a crucial component of Travel Leaders / Destinations Unlimited’s travel risk mitigation platform, CARE. CARE utilizes artificial intelligence to scan critical event information sources such as government and weather sites, social media and news organizations by parsing out the relevant information in order to corroborate that a critical event has taken place. When it’s determined that a critical event has happened, CARE immediately compares all of a higher education institution’s travelers’ locations with the critical event location and sends out an incident alert to all potentially affected travelers, as well as the school’s chief risk officer. Again, this all happens within minutes and allows the chief risk officer and travelers to communicate with each other in the event that the traveler needs assistance or to simply inform their school that they are okay. If further assistance is needed, the school can then put their duty of care plan into action.
Within duty of care and travel risk management, TDD is an important topic to consider. If your school’s TDD doesn’t give you peace of mind, there are alternatives available. For assistance with crafting a duty of care plan and implementing travel risk management solutions, contact Travel Leaders / Destinations Unlimited.