In North Marion County, It's MessengerPlus to the Rescue
When you're dealing with human lives, the proper response team with the proper equipment can mean life or death. That's why one progressive emergency services organization chose MessengerPlus for its operational core.
Marianne Wolf, director of North Marion County Communications, knows firsthand the critical importance of dispatching a 911 call quickly and accurately. For years, her center has provided dispatching services for five fire districts, two police agencies and a private ambulance service in North Marion County, Ore. All but one of the fire districts are composed of volunteers.
Located in Woodburn, Ore., North Marion County Communications operates with 10 full-time and four part-time employees. An "intergovernmental entity" since July 1995, Wolf's agency was once a department within the city of Woodburn. It now provides contract dispatching services to the public safety agencies surrounding it.
The Solution
When a 911 call is received for fire or emergency medical services (EMS), a dispatcher immediately enters into the center's computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system the incident, location and basic information about the incident. CAD makes a recommendation for apparatus to be assigned to respond, the page number in the respondents' map book, and date and time the call is dispatched. MessengerPlus, which is constantly scanning the data queue, uses the alphanumeric output to determine who should be alerted. The information is instantly routed through a leased line to the paging company in Portland.
"Typically the pages are received within eight to 10 seconds of the time that we send it to the queue," said Wolf. "It's very fast, extremely efficient and has cut down on the need for us to have to repeat information to the field responders."
MessengerPlus, which has been operating in North Marion County for about a year, also allows Wolf to establish special group-response paging. For example, if an incident involves a water rescue, specific members of the water rescue team can be alerted. Or, in the event of a multi-alarm structure fire, all captains and chief officers can be alerted and may respond.
Prior to installing MessengerPlus, North Marion County public safety officials carried auditrons, a voice paging system. In the event of an emergency, an audible message would be dispatched. If the respondent didn't hear the entire voice message, it would have to be repeated—a waste of precious time.
"With the alphanumeric pagers, we have a maximum character count of 400 that can be transmitted," explained Wolf. "If the message is beyond that, the paging company will split the message and send it in a second page, but it's very rare that we would send something with that much data."
In 1995 Wolf began searching for capable software that would transform her center into one of the growing number of computer-aided 911 dispatch service centers that utilizes alpha-numeric paging as an integral part of fire/EMS dispatch. She sought assistance from a local computer analyst, who suggested a couple of options including MessengerPlus, which was being used successfully in the hospitals he contacted and at Harrah's Atlantic City.
"MessengerPlus provided all of the features that we wanted in paging and it was affordable," said Wolf. "Because my center is small and I have a very tight budget, I wanted something that was going to be cost-effective."
Because of the success that the Woodburn Fire District has had with MessengerPlus, all of the fire agencies are now on board and the paging company has provided Wolf with an incentive—the more pagers she has onboard, the lower their monthly costs.
For residents of North Marion County, MessengerPlus is keeping a watchful eye on their safety.
Learn more about the North Marion County 911.
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Resource Details
Type: Case Study
Product: MessengerPlus
Customer: North Marion County, Oregon
Summary
When you're dealing with human lives, the proper response team with the proper equipment can mean life or death. That's why one progressive emergency services organization chose MessengerPlus for its operational core.
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