#publicsafetysoftware

While many of us realize the toll suicide and mental health take on our communities, the numbers are truly eye-opening. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), over 1 million people per year attempt suicide, over 3 million make a plan for suicide, and over 12 million seriously think about suicide. To provide a more personalized response to them, and to improve overall 9-1-1 emergency call handling capacity, starting on July 16, 2022, the 9-8-8 hotline goes live. 9-8-8 is more than just a number. It is a framework that implements community based care by giving people in an emergency mental health crisis someone to call, someone to respond, and somewhere to go, leveraging an emergency response platform.

SOMEONE TO CALL

When someone reaches 9-8-8 they are getting a mental health professional (using some of the best emergency medical services software) on the line, or at minimum someone with lived experience who understands what they are going through. Many times, people in crisis just need someone to talk to, but when they call 9-1-1, time is a limited resource. Regardless of which public safety communication management software company powers their operations, 9-1-1 professionals do not have the appropriate time to sit with a caller through their struggle if it doesn’t involve an emergency situation or acute crisis. With limited staffing, lack of time and training, and lack of resources, the 911 dispatcher (trained in incident management software for emergencies and events) is not equipped to handle the caller’s needs. 9-8-8 is meant to provide a listening ear from a clinical perspective. Around 80% of calls to 9-8-8 will be resolved over the phone simply by employing active listening techniques and an affirming presence.

SOMEONE TO RESPOND

With the current 9-1-1 system, call takers and dispatchers using a public safety software platform really can only send three resources: police, fire, or EMS (Emergency Medical Services). Mental health patients who enter the 9-1-1 pipeline may have needs that extend outside of the reach of the traditional police, fire and EMS response. Enter the new first responder: Mobile Crisis units. Mobile crisis units, whether regional or local, can be dispatched to better address the needs of someone in a mental health crisis. Mobile crisis units can have various make-ups depending on the jurisdiction and public safety call center software in use. Some mobile crisis teams may be composed of only mental health clinicians and some mobile crisis teams are composed of a mental health clinician, police officer, and medic. Whatever the make up, this is a huge divergence to have mental health workers acting as a rapid intervention team for mental health field work. The goal is to resolve the patients’ need on scene to reduce hospital intake, police transport, or escalation of the crisis. When the patient’s need can not be easily resolved on scene the mobile crisis team can request transport of the patient to an outpatient facility.

SOMEWHERE TO GO

Each state has to identify local crisis centers that can handle outpatient needs for those in a mental health crisis. The emergency room of a hospital is often not equipped to handle mental illness, deterioration, or neurodivergence, so with these outpatient facilities, patients can receive quality care that matches their concern. After mobile crisis units respond, if the patient needs a crisis clinic, rehabilitation center, shelter, peer recovery center, that transport can be arranged and the mobile crisis responder follows up with that patient, providing a higher level of service and ensuring a continuity of care. This is a complete divergence from what we’ve seen with mental health patients that end up in the public safety pipeline. Often they get transported to the emergency room or jail, tying up several response resources, only to end up back in the same pipeline the next day, or week.

SYSTEMIC CHANGE

9-8-8 will not be perfect, and we shouldn’t expect it to be. No system is perfect. Just as it took 54 years for 9-1-1 to evolve and grow into what it is today, we have to give 9-8-8 the same grace to grow and evolve as well. 9-8-8 is also not its own island. 9-8-8 needs 9-1-1. Both systems working together, using the latest in emergency call center software, will create better community outcomes, save lives, and restore public trust. But while 9-8-8 develops, our 9-1-1 call centers using 9-1-1 call taking software can not sit idly watching. We have to stay engaged. Policies and procedures have to be made to ensure proper call handling as well as identify at which points during call processing is 9-1-1 liable to handle the call vs 9-8-8. Frontline call takers and dispatchers should also be trained to handle mental health emergencies. Just because 9-8-8 is launching, doesn’t mean all mental health calls will go through them. 9-1-1 is still the most recognized number and our 9-1-1 professionals operating emergency call handling software are still the gatekeepers to access other services. This means we have to invest in call taker training. Everything goes back to training. Equipping call takers with mental health first aid training in the same way we recertify call takers each year in CPR training, would go a long way to educating our frontline on what mental health is, what symptoms look like, and how those symptoms may present over the phone. Our police, fire, and EMS personnel should also invest in crisis intervention training in addition to emergency response software for incident management. While there is a big push to get police officers CIT trained, the fire and ems personnel sometimes fall through the cracks. They too deal with mental health deterioration during transport and will need to learn how to deescalate a patient in the absence of officers. Systemic change does not happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen in vacuum. It takes all hands. Get involved with the changes happening locally and nationally and continue to talk about what policies and procedures need to be implemented to make sure we are getting the right help to the right people. Every time we talk about mental health, we are stopping the stigma. Let’s continue the conversation in our 9-1-1 centers, in our communities, in our homes, and let’s be the generation to break the cycle of suffering in silence.

Whether you are a caller, a call-taker, dispatcher, police officer, firefighter, or paramedic, Carbyne is committed to providing you and your organization with the tools so you can provide the right emergency response for your community, because every person counts. To schedule a free Carbyne demo, please visit https://carbyne.com/wtt.

Carbyne (Headquartered in New York, NY) is a leading global provider of cloud-native mission-critical contact center solutions. Carbyne is one of the largest rich-data providers for emergency response centers, delivering over 250M data points per year all in a unified platform. Our technologies enable emergency contact centers and select enterprises to connect with callers as well as connected devices via highly secure communication channels without needing to download a consumer app. With a mission to redefine emergency collaboration and connect the dots between people, enterprises and governments, Carbyne provides a unified cloud native solution that provides live actionable data that can lead to more efficient and transparent operations and ultimately save lives. With Carbyne, every person counts.

Over the Top Cloud Native Solution

Universe is a powerful cloud-native solution

 that connects directly to your call centers at lightning-fast speed to bring the most advanced caller location capabilities: video to 9-1-1 (patented), verified instant chat, conferencing, and more–without an app and within two clicks.

Why Universe

Universe provides real-time, dynamic caller location.

 Pinpoint your caller (up to 12 ft accuracy) with live movement tracking, floor indicators, altitude, and speed on traffic or satellite view. This means faster dispatching, accurate data gathering, and better overall response.

Changes at Scale 

Universe transforms operations at scale in the blink of an eye. 

Emergency Communication Application

Add innovation to your platform without the heavy lifting 

Emergency Communications as a Service (ECaaS) by Carbyne enables partners to dramatically enhance your existing platform capabilities by adding video, voice, messaging and real time location with just a few lines of code. Applications like Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and other mission critical system can benefit from enhanced situational awareness and multi-channel communication for better incident outcomes.

Faster time to market

Since Carbyne ECaaS is delivered to you as a cloud-native service, you don’t have to build all the infrastructure from the ground up. A few lines of code is all you need to enable Carbyne’s ECaaS capabilities. You can be up and running in days with little or no upfront cost.

Although 86% of 9-1-1 calls are made through wireless devices according to the National 911 Progress Report, our heroes in uniform don’t have access to all the amazing modern technology that we take for granted at the palms of our hands. In this article we discuss how getting eyes on the scene of the emergency (e.g. via Carbyne’s patented live caller video ) can positively and dramatically improve situational awareness for call-takers, dispatchers, police officers, firefighters, and paramedics alike.

Call-Takers: America’s Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) are staffed by two critical functions: call-takers and dispatchers. Call-takers are our true First Responders in every sense of the word, since they are the first people that respond when we call 9-1-1. Call-takers have the thankless job of calming us down in our moment of panic, and trying to determine the nature of our emergency so they can help dispatch the right field response to our aid. If eye-witness testimony is unreliable, one can only imagine the potential for misinterpretation when a caller who has just experienced an emergency is trying to describe the scene to the call-taker. Instead of a verbal description of the scene, modern technology enables call-takers to get live video streamed from the caller’s phone, taking misinterpretation errors out of the emergency response equation. All a call-taker needs to make this happen is a cloud-native call-handling system like Carbyne that supports live video without needing to download an app.

Resolve your calls at lightning speed and great customer satisfaction. Carbyne Universe & APEX enables enterprise contact centers to have a direct, rich media-led conversation with their callers leveraging military-grade security and data privacy.

Carbyne offers several unique new features for enterprise contact centers with data collaboration capabilities that other solutions can’t provide.

The public safety world is unique in many ways. Success is measured by lives saved while standard business ROI metrics are secondary. Trust is earned primarily through a track record of reliability. Employees always feel a real sense of pride in what they do and everyone you meet seems to have 30 years of experience in the industry.

In my short time at New York based public safety communication management software company Carbyne (in public safety standards), I spent time researching trends affecting the public safety call center software industry and predicting their implications on the PSAPs of the future. When it comes to what lies ahead for emergency call center software and relevant clients, I will share my thoughts below, however, the bottom line is that the future will look very different from the past, now is a good time to start preparing, and despite some of the pessimism in the buildup there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Let’s start with staffing, since PSAPs (who are the primary users of 911 call taking software) are already having a difficult time finding talent. It’s important to note that for better and worse this issue is not unique to PSAPs, as general unemployment levels are constantly setting record lows. Other reasons for this problem include “the great resignation” led by a new generation of employees being less loyal than ever before. Staying at one place for two years is considered dedication, remote jobs offered via email and LinkedIn provide a constant flow of alternatives and rising private sector salaries and benefits are putting additional pressure on government agencies. Contracting demographics and urbanization also don’t favor most agencies using emergency call handling software. In short, PSAPs, like all organizations, will need to do more to find new employees and work harder to keep them happy. Technology will play a critical role in empowering employees by minimizing repetitive tasks and allowing each employee to handle a larger workload.

The second issue is the workload itself surrounding emergency response software and incident management. Sociologists expect crime and social unrest driven by wealth gaps to be on the rise. Putting politics aside, wealth gaps have historically created social pressures towards redistribution of resources, and these types of pressures have led to crime and violence across geographies. Certain segments of the workforce being replaced by machines, rising levels of debt, and high inflation will create additional conflict, and the above will translate into more 911 calls hitting thinly stretched public safety agencies.

A third point is budgets for emergency response platform clients. While there is no indication that public safety budgets will shrink (the opposite is true), government agencies should be prepared for the option of a long-term reversal. One reason for this is rising government debt, which accelerated during COVID to unprecedented levels. In recent months we’ve heard the Fed talk about the need to reduce its balance sheet, which can be done by decreasing government spending. The first piece of good news is that public safety by nature will always be considered a necessity and will only be affected only after all other options have been exhausted. The second is that cloud native deployments can actually reduce spend on public safety solutions by up to 75% in the long run via lower costs of delivery and and zero to no implementation costs (you can put a ping pong table in the server room).

The fourth point is the growing opportunity created by technology (light at the end of the tunnel was promised). Historically, military technologies, such as GPS, were first used by governments and only then adopted by the business sector. The trend is reversed in public safety as technologies developed by businesses for customers made their way backwards. The 12-year-old facetiming his mom is expecting to do the same with 911, and his mom who knows the uber is arriving in 4 minutes expects the same type of communication if she were to call for help. After many years of NG911 being a futuristic prospect, these technologies are now available at a lower cost and higher levels of reliability than ever before via cloud native deployments.

To summarize the points above, PSAPs need to prepare to do more work – with less people. This may sound worrisome, but I truly believe this challenge can be overcome with technology, and specifically via cloud native applications.  Take incident management software for emergencies and events for instance. These applications are already more reliable than their legacy predecessors (e.g., you can take calls remotely if the power goes down), they increase efficiency as they are more advanced by nature (e.g., you automatically know the location of the caller), and they are cost effective in the long run. Moreover, cool, for the lack of a better word, technologies will make your call takers happier as they spend the day working on a beautiful interface, seamlessly collaborating with other agencies, and knowing that they are giving the citizens they serve the best service by leveraging the greatest technologies on the market.

Whether you are a caller experiencing an emergency, a call-taker, dispatcher, police officer, firefighter, or paramedic, Carbyne is committed to providing you a public safety software platform that is ready for the future, because every person counts. To schedule a free Carbyne demo, please visit https://carbyne.com/wtt.