Firefighters heading to a fire in Anoka County, Minnesota will soon know if they will be walking into a drug house, thanks to a new Public Safety Data System initiative to integrate fire and law enforcement information. The County is setting a public safety standard for communities nationwide with the 26-agency system, which will improve the safety of responders and citizens by enabling fire and law enforcement agencies to share crucial emergency during a response.
“Police going to a crime scene will know if there are hazardous materials on site before they arrive, which is critical to staying safe during a response,” says Ed Colin, President of FDM Software. “Building information is routinely collected and available to fire personnel through their Records Management System (RMS), but now certain records will be made available to police as well. For their part, firefighters will have access to particular police records about private homes that were previously unavailable to them.”
The system will reduce duplication of effort and minimize errors that can result from entering the same information twice. Once an incident is dispatched, incident details are automatically saved into the RMS. Details such as time of dispatch, address, and attendees at the incident are available for a later incident report without having to enter them again.
Records Management is Integral to Reporting, Analysis– and Improvement
FDM recently went live with Phase 1 of its RMS implementation for Anoka County, putting into operation Incidents, Properties and Personnel modules along with a two-way interface between the Computer Aided Dispatch system and the Records Management system. These modules will house the vital building and contact information police and fire need before they head into an emergency situation. The Incidents module will capture the details of the situation to enable agencies to analyze their response after the crisis.
“That’s the goal of Records Management: To have all that rich data at hand to evaluate and plan for a better response, for continual improvement. In a later phase of this project, FDM will implement our Analytics module, a business intelligence tool that gives a Dashboard view of key incident information. Because it’s visual and hands on, this tool makes it easy for Chiefs and County officials to understand at a glance what is going on and to drill down for the details they need to make the best possible decisions,” says Ed Colin.
