By James Mayse
The Messenger-Inquirer

DAVIESS, Ky. — Technology has greatly changed operations at Daviess County's 911 dispatch center in recent years.

Now, advanced technology will allow city and county emergency dispatchers to accurately gauge how quickly ambulances will reach residents in emergencies.

The city and county's new agreement with Yellow Enterprise System for ambulance service includes updated ambulance response times for the entire county.

Daviess County 911 Director Paul Nave said officials used Geographical Information System mapping technology to know how long it will take ambulances to reach each part of the city and county.

"Since the previous contract (was signed 10 years ago) to now, we have gone 100 percent GIS," Nave said. " ... So when a 911 call comes in (dispatchers) know exactly what the response (time) is without question, because it's 100 percent accurate through GIS."

The GIS mapping allowed officials to create five zones that cover the county, each with different response times. Nave said officials were able to study the types of roads ambulances would take and the speed the roads would allow when creating the response zones.

Previously, the response zones were based on fire districts, which created some peculiarities in the response times ambulances were required to meet, Nave said.

For example, unincorporated areas of the county had response times of 12 minutes, while the response time for city neighborhoods surrounding the unincorporated pocket had seven-minute response times, Nave said.

"Burns Middle School was a 12-minute response time, and everything around it was a seven-minute response time," Nave said. " ... I know the ambulance service would not do this, but they could have taken 12 minutes to get to the middle school" under the previous contract with the city and county.

The new response zones spread out in rough circles from the city to the county borders. Because ambulances are stationed within city limits, the response time increases as the zones move outward from the city.

Tim Benningfield, a member of the group that created the response zones, said the zone are "more accurate as to (response) accountability."

"The GIS system gave us the ability to use good roads and distance to estimate the response time," Benningfield said. The ambulance service will be required to meet the response times in each district 90 percent of the time, Benningfield said.

If the ambulance service fails to meet the response times 90 percent of the time, the service can be penalized financially, Nave said.

The new zones were not created in response to problems with the ambulance service meeting mandated response times in the previous contract, Benningfield said.

Copyright 2008 Messenger-Inquirer