A car crashes head-on with a tanker on a remote rural highway. The occupants are unconscious, but telematics information from the car, indicating the exact location and injury-prediction data, is sent to an OnStar call center, which automatically sends it to the nearest PSAP. A public safety telecommunicator receives the information on her computer screen and, according to protocol, dispatches an air ambulance and notifies the nearest trauma center. Responding police, firefighters and the flight crew are supplied real-time video of the scene from a bystander’s phone, providing critical information about scene safety.
—Coming someday from a 911 call center near you
The first 911 call was made in Haleyville, Ala., on Feb. 16, 1968. A lot has changed in the world of communications in the past 43 years, but our 911 system isn’t one of them.
As I write this, National 911 Education Month (held every April) is winding down. One of the goals of a new campaign (know911.org) is to inform the public not to text 911 in an emergency. It’s ironic that our kids communicate in a hundred different ways—including voice, video and data—on a staggering number of devices (especially staggering if you’re doing the buying), but our 911 system remains firmly in the analog world of the 1960s. (Well, maybe not firmly. As reported last month in BP, there is one PSAP in Iowa that can receive texts.)
But that is changing. The National 911 Program (part of the U.S. Department of Transportation) has been leading the Next Generation 911 Initiative (NG911), which aims to bring PSAPs up to date in terms of digital and Internet technology. Early on, NG911 focused on the extraordinary technical challenges involved (architecture, standards, costs), but last year, in a forward-looking move, it convened a group of EMS, fire, police and transportation stakeholders to answer the question, “What’s next?” That is, how can the end users in public safety (the firefighters, cops and paramedics) use the new information (photos, video, texts, telematic data) that an IP-enabled PSAP can deliver?
Laurie Flaherty, the National 911 Program director, recently spoke at the Navigator conference. She talked about the preliminary results of the “What’s Next” meeting and what it means for each of the public safety disciplines in terms of safety, improved resource allocation, cross-discipline communication and better patient care. Not all examples are as dramatic as the one at the beginning of this column, but together they show what a difference NG911 will make. They include getting a patient’s medical history en route; using telemedicine with physicians in the hospital; instituting real-time analysis of historical and GPS information to make deployment and routing recommendations; getting critical info in advance from police on scene; being able to get a variety of experts—those from suicide hotlines, poison control or hazmat, say—seamlessly on the phone with the caller ... and many more.
For EMS, one of the least understood—but most promising—features of NG911 is that the same technology that will handle 911 calls can also transmit voice, images, video, remote database access or virtually any type of data within or among agencies of any type. Better yet, many of the potential benefits that NG911 offers are not part of the system itself, but will come from applications that the system makes possible. In other words, the app store for emergency responders will soon be open.
To be sure, there are formidable challenges, but the reality is that NG911 is coming, and EMS will have significant opportunities to build on this infrastructure to redefine what it is. Get ready.
Keith Griffiths can be reached at publisher@emergencybestpractices.com.
