For busy Public Safety departments, staying at the forefront of technology has always been important. The advent of Next Generation 9-1-1 has made it critical. That was certainly the case for the Washington County, Pennsylvania Public Safety Center.
Located southwest of Pittsburgh, Washington County is home to the cities of Washington and Monongahela as well as slightly more than 200,000 citizens. This Public Safety Center receives an average of 1,000 phone calls, and dispatches 400 emergencies, every day, to some 53 fire departments, 12 emergency medical services, 44 police departments, and various county agencies.
Washington County’s evolution toward Next Generation 9-1-1 began more than 10 years ago. The National Emergency Number Association (NENA) began its NG9-1-1 Project in 2003 and continues toward the ultimate goal of establishing national standards and implementation plans that take into account the changing ways in which people communicate.
Through both the NENA Project and the national 911 Improvement Act of 2008, communications are recognized to go far beyond voice…including text, data, images and video. NextGen 9-1-1 requires Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) to accept any of these communication types from any wired, wireless or IP-based device. These enabled PSAPs will also be able to receive data from telematics such as personal safety devices, like collision notification and medical alert systems. A NextGen 9-1-1 Public Safety Center will also be able to issue emergency alerts within a specified area to wireless devices via text or voice.
For the Washington County 9-1-1 Public Safety Center, part of their NextGen preparation meant upgrading internal systems such as call recording. They turned to Sound Communications (SCI), where we’d been providing them with expertise, hardware and software since 2001.
“The Next Generation 9-1-1 initiative has huge ramifications for everyone working in public safety centers, and for those of us who support them,” says Darin Cooper, Chief Technology Officer at SCI. “Fortunately, we and our technology partner Verint Systems have been intimately involved in the developing Next Gen 9-1-1 standards. We’ve come to see this as an opportunity to use the technology we love in new and exciting ways for our customers.”
SCI began working with the Washington County 9-1-1Public Safety Center in the second quarter of 2011 to design a new recording solution that would be compatible with current NG9-1-1 requirements. The system in place at that time was built on version 3.3 of Verint’s Audiolog Digital Recording Platform and primarily recorded analog and PRI traffic.
The new design, created by SCI’s Cooper, provided for the following:
- Upgraded hardware that provided faster processing, greater storage with additional redundancies, and server-class operating systems;
- Upgraded Audiolog software (v5.0) that featured a new, browser-based incident management module, Insight Center;
- Addition of screen capture software for dispatch stations to capture texts, photos, telematics and other non-audio inputs;
- Integration of recording with the County’s Cisco CallManager to provide for recording of non-911 lines;
- Upgraded software for Audiolog’s AIQ module, an evaluation tool that supports quality monitoring for dispatchers and call-takers;
- Addition of Speech Analytics Essentials for Audiolog, a leading-edge application that allows for searching audio content within the recorded calls; and
- Professional services, including project management and training, to ensure Washington County 9-1-1 could fully use the new system to optimize their center.
“With every project, we include a comprehensive professional services package,” Cooper notes. “Helping the Public Safety Center get off to a good start makes all the difference in the world as to whether they use the applications effectively. We’ve learned that a personal approach works much better than just giving customers a manual and moving on.”
Implementation of the new recording infrastructure for the Washington County Public Safety Center began in September of 2011 and was completed in December of that year. Speech Analytics for Audiolog was treated as a separate project, beginning in February, 2012 and ending in April, 2012.