Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Dispatch Cad Mapping topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
County 9-1-1 officials tell Webster County advisory council CAD mapping and reporting gaps need fixing
Summary
Webster County dispatch officials told the EMS advisory council that outdated GIS/CAD mappings and inconsistent call coding have produced divergent reports of which agency responded to calls; the council asked for an audit and an EMS coordinator to help standardize procedures.
County 9-1-1 and dispatch staff told Webster County’s EMS Advisory Council on Oct. 22 that inconsistencies between CAD export sheets and run reports are partly due to outdated GIS mapping and coding practices in the Computer Aided Dispatch system, and that a planned software and procedure rollout could reduce errors.
Kristi Lumsen, who manages the dispatch center, told the council: “We are totally neutral… our CAD… when a dispatcher gets a call… our mapping currently only says Fort Dodge as in EMS transport… it doesn’t say Otho is a transport so it’s up to the dispatcher to utilize that” (SEG 379–387; SEG 392–396). Lumsen described how dispatchers sometimes rely on memory when GIS layers are not updated and recommended creating playbooks for new agencies to remove ambiguity in dispatch decisions.
Webster County Director of 9‑1‑1 Brian Hitchcock presented a reconciled version of call data and said he found additional calls and differences in how events and non‑EMS entries were counted. Hitchcock summarized his review: after removing special events and calls prior to Otho’s service date, his reprocessing showed roughly 111 calls in the dataset and that units associated with Otho responded to 45 of them; he recommended a deeper call‑by‑call audit to measure response times and correct unit attribution in CAD (SEG 480–561).
Council members and dispatch staff discussed planned improvements including an Intelecom EMD implementation, creation of standard operating procedures and SOP review with an EMS coordinator. The council agreed dispatch should be closely involved in the response plan work and that dispatch will provide a list of items to work through with the new coordinator and stakeholders.
On budget, Crystal reported collections so far: “we are a little shy of 850,000 that have been collected so far” toward a projected $1,500,000 (SEG 2471–2478). The council directed members to start drafting the 2080 service agreements that will formalize who is first out to incident areas and how tiers will be handled.
Ending: The council asked staff to audit raw CAD and ImageTrend records, coordinate with dispatch to update GIS layers, and return findings at the Nov. 5 meeting so the advisory body and county supervisors can make data-driven funding recommendations.
