| New Address |
| FirstWatch Office
904 Second Street
Encinitas, CA 92024
p. (760) 943-9123
f. (760) 942-8329 |
| Welcome Our Newest Customers |
|
Los Angeles Fire, CA
Seattle Fire, WA
Suffolk County EMS, NY
AMR Sonoma County, CA
Metro Ambulance, GA
Pucket EMS, GA
Grady Health EMS, GA
Gwinnett County Fire & Emergency Services, GA
Austin-Travis County EMS, TX
Winnipeg Fire & Paramedic Services, Canada |
|
Greetings from FirstWatch!
We have had an eventful year! Thanks to you, our great customers, FirstWatch continues to grow and evolve with the help of your suggestions and ideas for improving FirstWatch. Just as our FirstWatch software continues to evolve, our FirstWatch team keeps getting better as well. We are delighted to announce the addition of our new full-time team members: John Selters, Operations Manager and Lara Snyder, Marketing and Sales Coordinator. With our growth in staff and customers, we outgrew our old offices. In July we moved to a larger office space about two blocks away.
Around that same time, we brought another FirstWatch subscriber site data center online and upgraded our existing data center. These changes are described in more detail below, and have resulted in even higher reliability and system performance. Our system was put to the test with the recent wildfires here in Southern California, when many of us faced evacuation from our homes. Due to several hours of lost power and poor air quality in Encinitas, we couldn't work from our office. During this time, our FirstWatch system maintained 100% uptime, and those of us who were not evacuated worked from home and kept things running remotely. Thanks to all of you for your words of support and encouragement during and after the fires and special thanks go to our great public safety and public health customers here in San Diego County, who fought the fires, kept the peace, and maintained our community's health.
In August, I was honored to be elected the new chairperson of the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) External Partners Committee. If you would like more information about ISDS click here for the ISDS website. We have been attending their GREAT annual education conferences for the last five years. In fact, we just got back from the 2007 ISDS Conference in Indianapolis, where Dr. Alex Garza submitted an abstract and presented on the benefits of pre-hospital/9-1-1 data. Click here to read Abstract. Dr. Garza is helping us out with special research projects and we are very happy to have him in our corner, reaching out to the EMS and public health community.
Finally, I'm pleased to announce that over the next few weeks one of our former customers, Glen Youngblood, will be working with Kurt Mills and the rest of our team to bring our Regional Influenza Network (RIN) back online for this flu season. We have a goal of integrating our RIN trigger with our Public Safety Awareness Network (PSAN) trigger, that was developed based on feedback from our West Coast customers, to create a much larger "flu-like symptom" network across our entire customer base in the US and Canada.
Thank you for your support and your business. We look forward to your ideas and serving you for years to come.
Sincerely,
Todd Stout, President |
|
|
69 FirstWatch Customers
(Click on map to enlarge)
69 metro areas are live to date across North America, representing more than 47,126,767 residents. FirstWatch is the recognized leader in real-time public safety data analysis & automated alerting.
More than 12,000,000 real-time public safety & public health records have been analyzed for our LIVE customer sites.
FirstWatch is currently integrated with CAD systems for EMS, Fire & Police, ProQA data, Paramedic ePCR data, Hospital Emergency Department data, Hospital Diversion systems, Poison Center Data -overall more than 30 different data sources!
|
Flu Season
Regional Influenza Network (RIN) and 9-1-1 data
As we venture into flu season, some agencies are detecting outbreaks and responding more pro-actively through the use of the FirstWatch RIN Trigger. Click here for Trigger Example.
For more information on joining the RIN Network, contact us at rin@firstwatch.net or call (760) 943-9123 ext. 204.
The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration released a report dicussing 9-1-1 Data Used for Situational Awareness and Readiness for Pandemic Influenza. Click here for NHTSA Report
Each year in the United States, on average: 5% to 20% of the population gets the flu, more than 200,000 people are hospitalized from flu complications and about 36,000 people die from the flu. Click for more information from the CDC website
National Influenza Vaccination Week:
|
|
Southern California Wildfires
Wildfires that started Sunday, October 22, left several hundreds of thousands of acres burned throughout Southern California. Tragically, a number of lives and many homes were lost despite the incredibly courageous efforts of Fire and EMS teams from all over the United States. As the fires spread ferociously from one region of San Diego to the next, 9-1-1 calls indicated which direction the fire was heading. FirstWatch's immediate mapping of all fire related calls provided San Diego County Health and Human Services teams with real-time situational awareness information without asking the busy 9-1-1 communications centers for status updates during this crisis situation. The real-time 9-1-1 Fire & EMS dispatch data from across San Diego County showed huge spikes in call volume for fire and respiratory related calls. The air, heavy and dark, filled with ash and vapors of plastics and treated wood that once made up someone's home, wreaked havoc on those with asthma, other respiratory problems or weakened immune systems. FirstWatch was able to show geo-clusters of calls in specific areas which guided authorized Public Safety and Public Health officials during and post event. The Retrospective Analysis tool also aided in providing timely intelligence on transports from the various evacuation centers. |
Seattle Fire Department
"Situation Found"
In an effort to continue providing exceptional public safety, Seattle Fire Department has developed an innovative solution as part of the Seattle Metro Pan Flu project that allows medics and field personnel to record symptoms on every patient contact. This will help in the monitoring and early detection of potential outbreaks. By partnering with FirstWatch on this unique pilot program, the FirstWatch real-time analytics with the Situation Found database will allow the Seattle Metro Public Safety and Public Health officials to analyze data for trends, patterns and clusters of Influenza-Like Illness (ILI) symptoms. Using FirstWatch, the Situation Found data can then be aggregated with (or compared against) the initial 9-1-1 CAD incident/chief complaint to help the Seattle teams develop a real-time situational awareness picture for their patient encounters in the field. Click here Triggers for more information about this Trigger or other Triggers.
|
New Data Center
Improved Redundancy and Performance
In order to provide the best level of availability including contingencies for major disasters, we've opened a second network operation center at a commercial Level-3 facility. Level-3 operates one of the largest communications and Internet Backbones in the world. By locating our equipment inside one of these facilities we are able to offer unsurpassed levels of redundancy and availability, all located in a hardened and secure environment.
Each of our data centers integrates a set of locally redundant data paths and failover mechanisms focused on automatic switching in the event of a hardware or other failure. Additionally we're using third party DNS failovers in the event that either one of our data centers has a catastrophic failure. All of these features are integrated with a 24x7x365 on-call staff who are alerted of any irregularities by our own and third party system health monitors.
FirstWatch provides this level of service and support because we know that is what our customers expect and require. Our background is public safety so we understand first-hand the importance you place on critical systems like FirstWatch. For more information on our systems and process, automatic failover, uptime monitoring, security or other IT related issues, please contact us by emailing support@firstwatch.net
| |
|
Look for FirstWatch at these Upcoming Conferences and Events in Early 2008
- NAEMSP, Phoenix, January 10-12
- Firehouse World, San Diego, February 3-7
- Public Health Preparedness Summit, Atlanta, Feb 18-22
- California Police Chiefs Association, Fresno, March 2-6
- EMS Today, Baltimore, March 27-29
|
|
How are we doing?
Do you have feedback, suggestions or ideas related to your team's innovative use of FirstWatch as a Best Practice? If so, please contact Lara Snyder in our Marketing Department at 760-943-9123 ext. 203
|
FirstWatch Team |
|
|
