Oklahoma city launches portal to help staff field and prioritize 911 calls
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The web-based portal will eventually integrate with the city’s CAD system, helping to streamline response times and operations across the police, fire and emergency medical departments, one official says.
As public safety agencies nationwide increasingly grapple with staffing shortages, expanding communities and increasing demand on emergency communications centers, many departments are looking to upgrade their call systems.
The Oklahoma City Police Department, for instance, launched a new portal last week to help 911 staff more efficiently field alarm-based calls, said Katherine Underwood, a management specialist for the Oklahoma City Police Department.
In public safety, “the name of the game is how [we] can provide more efficient service and more availability to people who truly need to talk to us on the phone,” she said.
That’s why the OKPD is now leveraging a web-based portal that alerts calls to the city’s 911 center that were triggered by an alarm going off, such as a fire alarm, she explained. The ASAP Service solution was developed by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials and The Monitoring Association.
Alarm company staff can also leverage the portal to share call information through the site, including whether the alert was related to a burglary or other event. This allows the city’s 911 dispatchers to more effectively prioritize their call queue, reduce the amount of call transfers and increase response times to public safety events, Underwood said.
Previously, Oklahoma City’s 911 call center staff, who served approximately 702,000 residents across four counties and received 1.5 million calls last year, had to juggle multiple calls between companies, city agencies and other stakeholders to gather all the information they needed before determining the appropriate response protocol, she said.
Public safety officials also plan to integrate the portal with the city’s CAD system to further enhance the city’s emergency response. Integrating the systems, for instance, will enable more advanced features such as verifying the address where an alarm was triggered, removing the burden on staff to do so manually before deploying emergency services.
When necessary, the verification process also helps staff expedite the call transfer process to a different jurisdiction if the address does not fall within Oklahoma City’s jurisdiction, which is not uncommon given the city’s extensive boundaries, Underwood said.
Broadly, city officials also hope that the portal and its integration with the city’s CAD system will help streamline responses across the city’s police, fire and emergency medical services since OKPD serves as the primary public safety answering point.
The integration will enable alerts coming through the portal to directly route to the CAD system, reducing the staff’’s burden to manage both platforms, so “the information will populate in the [CAD] system faster, and there won't be a point of failure from one person monitoring [the portal],” Underwood said.
“Seconds matter when it comes to, [for example] fighting fires,” she said. “We’re always looking for new technologies and new procedures that can help our [staff] and help the public at the same time.”