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This paper investigates a new type of humanitarian organization designed to coordinate government, non-profit, and private response organizations in the event of an urban multiple casualty incident (UMCI). These coordinating agents improve system response by providing on-scene responders with capacity information about the healthcare organizations serving UMCI casualties. The overall research objective of this paper is to better understand what types of urban multi-casualty incidents pose the greatest challenges to urban healthcare service infrastructure response and also how different UMCI challenges can be best met using different healthcare infrastructure coordination strategies and capacity levels. Field case research techniques are employed to detail the response process and roles of different players. This detailed contextual grounding is combined with proprietary archival data from the U.S. National Trauma Databank and two hospitals to develop a conceptual framework and model to assess emergency response effectiveness. This model allows evaluation of information that coordinating agents could obtain and provide to other autonomous entities in the health care response under different UMCI types and different healthcare infrastructure coordination approaches and capacity levels in a major urban area. Key findings show that providing information on entry level hospital care unit capacity provides less effect on disaster response than providing information on second-level patient care unit capacity. The study also finds that under high levels of information sharing that patients served varies considerably relative to when no information is shared, suggesting an unearthing of more fundamental hospital operations process challenges. In addition this study develops an empirically-grounded "stress test" to support public policy decision-making by identifying vulnerabilities in urban area UMCI response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]