EMS Magazine's Resource Guide: Communications

APCO News

In late February, the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) International and APCO Institute added Robert L. Smith to the staff roster in the position of EMD manager. Smith came to APCO from West Virginia, where he had been the youngest communications center director in the state. While in that position, he also served as emergency services response coordinator for the Public Governance Institute Congressional Retreat 2003 and for the Congressional Institute/Public Government Institute’s House & Senate Planning Conferences in 2002 and 2003. Smith, who is an EMT, previously served as a shift supervisor and training officer for the Raleigh County, WV, Emergency Services Authority. In 2002, he was listed in the International Who’s Who of Public Service Managers.

With extensive training in 9-1-1 communications, emergency management, hazardous materials, fire and EMS, Smith’s academic pursuits included biology and chemistry at West Virginia Tech and business management at Bluefield State College in Lewisburg, WV.

On March 1, the Regional Public Safety Communications Center (RCC) in Port Orange, FL, went live with APCO’s Emergency Medical Dispatch (EMD) Program. RCC provides police and fire dispatch services to the cities of Port Orange, New Smyrna Beach and Edgewater, and fire dispatch service to the city of Ponce Inlet. Staff consists of 27 full-time telecommunications officers, two part-time telecommunications officers, one operations manager, one administrative manager and an executive director. Dr. Todd Husty is employed as a medical consultant to ensure the best EMS services possible.

Shift staffing consists of a minimum of one team leader and five telecommunications officers. The center is equipped with 10 consoles, all of which are capable of dispatching police or fire, or functioning as a call-taker position. All telecommunications officers attended the APCO Basic Telecommunicator and APCO Basic EMD courses in-house.

Evoxis, Inc. Releases Intelligent Multi-Channel Notification System

Evoxis, Inc. of Pittsburgh, PA, has released Prodigent for Emergency Management—a communications system that provides detailed information to a variety of first responders and other emergency personnel through multiple communications channels.

“Just about every form of automated communications system out there takes a single message and delivers multiple copies of that message to a large audience,” says Evoxis’ CEO, Mohan Ramani. “That’s fine, but it creates a situation where all people know is that there’s been an event of some kind, and they have to engage in their own information-gathering to understand what they’re supposed to do and how they should react. We’ve solved that problem by shifting the paradigm to what we call one-to-one communication with a system that understands what’s happened and has the ability to custom-create individual messages for each responder.

“We’ve used a combination of techniques from artificial intelligence and another rather arcane field called ‘computational linguistics,’ which allows our software to understand the logic just as a dispatcher would when looking at a couple of points of data, such as ‘here’s the event, here’s the skill set, here’s what I need this person to do,’” Ramani continues. “The system is able to replicate the thought process of a dispatcher for each individual, whether it’s a firefighter, EMS, law enforcement or other responder.”

The first phase of the system is already up and running in southeast Pennsylvania and was recently demonstrated for senior officials in Washington, DC, who are in charge of federal procurement for emergencies. Most of the funding for the systems will come from the Office for Domestic Preparedness, says Ramani.

In the event of an emergency in Pennsylvania’s Region 13, the Prodigent system will be capable of sending discipline-specific messages to approximately 723 fire departments, 383 police departments, 202 EMS teams, 13 hazmat teams, two bomb teams and two SWAT teams. To learn more, go to www.evoxis.com.