GPS sends closest vehicle to 911 call
By Thomasi McDonald
The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
Copyright 2007 The News and Observer
RALEIGH, N.C. — There was no medical crisis, but a battery of emergency vehicles gathered at a Southeast Raleigh business park Monday to unveil new technology may help save more lives.
County officials, along with U.S. Rep. David Price, introduced a new vehicle tracking system at the Wake County Emergency Medical Services Training Center at 4011 Carya Drive.
The system, paid for by a $1.1 million federal grant, relies on global positioning systems that will allow emergency dispatchers to send the closest available emergency personnel to a crisis and enable law enforcement to communicate directly with EMS en route to a 911 call.
The Automated Vehicle Tracking System will go in all emergency vehicles used by EMS, the Wake County Sheriff's Office, the City-County Bureau of Identification and Animal Control, said Jeff Hammerstein, a Wake County EMS District Chief.
By using the same infrastructure, Wake EMS Chief Skip Kirkwood said, emergency vehicles will be able to respond to a 911 call faster.
"The closest emergency vehicle gets the call," Kirkwood said.
Years before, emergency vehicles roughly followed district lines established by volunteer fire departments, Hammerstein said.
In 2003, spurred by the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, county EMS officials adopted the Computer Aided Dispatch system that enabled dispatchers to send what appeared to be the closest emergency vehicle available.
That was plausible in theory, but sometimes an EMS station located by that system did not actually have an emergency vehicle available, EMS officials said.
"Right now, CAD knows where the station is and it sort of assumes the ambulance is at the station," Kirkwood said. "It might have been out doing business, like getting gas or parked at the [Wake County] Public Safety Center, or maybe it was being used for training purposes," Kirkwood said.
Now, a dispatcher can rely on the system to calculate the nearest ambulance and communicate directly with the vehicle.
"The dispatcher can know right up to the minute where the ambulance is," Kirkwood said.
