Who Said What When

     Complicated incidents often require recreation after the fact. In Houston, that's become easier with the implementation of NICE Inform at the city's consolidated 9-1-1 center. Made by NICE Systems, NICE Inform captures all telephone and radio conversations for police, fire and EMS, consolidating them in a central database. This database lets city officials create timelines of incidents, with all calls located graphically. In this way, senior officers can point-and-click their way through any event to learn who said what when.

     Houston consolidated its three communications centers into a single public-safety answering point in 2003 and invested in advanced emergency communications technology, but still employed separate voice-only recording solutions for police, fire and EMS. With the NICE solutions, including NICE Inform, the three departments can share a single partitioned and redundant solution for recording and reviewing emergency communications, which enhances reliability and reduces overhead and technical support requirements.

     "We have a digital recorder assigned to each group: police, fire and EMS," says Pat Kiernan, director of marketing for NICE Systems' Security Division. "We capture incoming telephone calls to 9-1-1 and radio traffic, recording approximately 250 lines and recording each in parallel. The total system can consolidate relevant 9-1-1 and radio recordings into a computer-accessible linear timeline. This allows city of Houston officials to see what calls were made, by whom and at what time. The result is a complete and sequential historical account of an incident at their fingertips."

     While Houston currently uses NICE Inform to recreate incidents from captured voice recordings, the solution also provides a future platform to securely manage many different types of multimedia incident information, including voice, text, photos, screen applications, data and video.

     "The NICE solutions are the next step in our evolution as a technologically advanced emergency communications center," says Matt Hyde, former chief technology officer for the Houston Emergency Center. "NICE offered us advanced capabilities and greater reliability, ease of use and scalability than we had before. With NICE Inform, we're also laying the foundation to extend our recording capability beyond voice to include data and video too."

     NICE Inform's design enables agencies to recreate incidents from start to finish, in sight and sound, by synchronously capturing and replaying voice recordings, screen applications and video. Those multimedia incident reconstructions are securely retained in incident folders and can be authenticated and easily shared. Additional documentation critical to an incident can be uploaded to folders as well. Further, a built-in audit trail secures evidence by tracking each time an incident folder is accessed or modified.

     "Our software automatically tracks who reviewed a file and when," says Kiernan. "It also records any changes made to the file, so the incident records are completely auditable."

     For more, see www.nice.com.

     James Careless is a freelance journalist with extensive experience covering public-safety communications issues.

     Want to expedite triage? How about marking patients with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags?

     VerdaSee Solutions, which makes RFID tags for tracking patients and medical supplies, has developed an RFID-based triage system called LifePac that uses passive RFID tags—each of which has a unique electronically readable identity—to improve the speed and accuracy of the triage process.

     "What we've done is taken an RFID chip and embedded it in the tag," says VerdaSee President/CEO Reuben Vasquez. "We also have a handheld RFID interrogator that can scan the tag, allowing the EMS officer to assign various qualities to that identity using pulldown menus. In this way, a patient can be triaged within 30 seconds, rather than the 4–5 minutes required by conventional methods.