Active 911 app

[Household6]

Here's our super new way of communication with Dispatch and other members of our volunteer First Responders.

http://www.active911.com/

We're going to try it, it's $11 a year for up to 20 phones.. Our vollys have Minitor pagers, but we're going to give this a try. The idea is that when Dispatch pages out the EMRs, they'll also send out a text through this system. The text will come through with mapping, and a route, and give the EMR a choice to click "Responding". That way, we'll know exactly who is en route, and their ETA. Dispatch can also send out additional information as it comes in.

I'd love to get radios for everyone, but the 800mhz ones we use are way too expensive..

Whatcha guys think?

 

[NomadicMedic]

I think that relying on a commercial cell phone system is great... Right up til it's not. We receive pages on our phones, along with commercial alpha pagers, UHF minitors and 800mhz radios. Often, we'll get the text message 10 or 15 minutes after the first page. It's just not reliable for mission critical alerting.

Also, when there is an emergency, the first system to fail from overuse and/or poor infrastructure redundancy will be the cell network.

 

[Handsome Robb]

I get all my work pages on my phone. 99% of the time the phone is exorbitantly faster than my pager.

 

[Household6]

I'll make sure that once it kicks in, we document the times of the texts compared with the times of the pages. That's good to know..

 

[jzero652]

We have Minitor pagers and get texts to our phone. The pagers are slightly faster, I'm talking seconds. We can respond directly to the text or we have a call in number that is automated that we can say which station we are responding to. We do not need to talk just press 1, 2, or 3 for the station number, then it says "thank you drive carefully" and hangs up. All the other info is derived from your phone number. When we respond it comes up on the dispatchers screen, a screen in the bay and one on the bus. It tells who we are what station we are going to and what our level of training is.

 

[Tigger]

We have it and I like it, however it is not a replacement for a pager. If the dispatcher does not remember to send the page it's obviously useless. And it's not like a regular alpha pager that's integrated into the cad, it's a superset thing altogether so we probably only have a 75% success rate of getting pages.

I don't think it's slow per say as usually we get them right about when they finish giving us the dispatch over the radio but the dispatcher needs to be on it.

The integration to your phones mapping app is super nice.

 

[TheLocalMedic]

I used this app for a while, but unfortunately it's often unreliable. Probably not the app's fault, but either the dispatcher of the cell network being slow. When it works, it works great… but we always carried our pagers too, and they seemed more reliable and faster.

 

[frdude1000]

I currently use Active911 with one of my services. I mostly use it for the mapping feature. When I am on shift, I am in a station with a piped in alerting system so Active911 is only a secondary alert. The app does a good job of giving you a direct running route.

The other use I have is for alerting me of big incidents in the county. If I see there is a big incident going on, I can go to the station to place another ambulance in service, etc.