| 75 FirstWatch Customers |
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Firstwatch monitors over 50 million residents and integrates with more than 30 data sources. Click for Data Source List
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| Customer Spotlight |
Share your good news with FirstWatch for future newsletters!
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| Welcome Our Newest Customers |
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Mid-Georgia Ambulance, GA
Cape County Private Ambulance, MO
Louisville Metro EMS, KY
Los Angeles City Fire, CA
Winnipeg Fire & Paramedic Services, Canada
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| Happy Anniversary |
EMSA - Tulsa & Oklahoma City, OK
Three Rivers Ambulance Authority, IN
REMSA - Reno, NV
4 Years!
MedStarOne. GA
3 Years!
Rural/Metro Pacific NorthWest, WA
Des Moines Fire & EMS, IA
City & County of San Francisco, CA
Heartland Fire - JPA San Diego, CA
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| New Address |
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FirstWatch
904 Second Street
Encinitas, CA 92024
p. (760) 943-9123
f. (760) 942-8329
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Dear FirstWatch Customers and Friends,
Spring is around the corner and I am excited and proud to announce that we've added two more great people to our team. Kevin Lee, a multi-talented Software engineer who helped create the first internet version of FirstWatch back in 2002, has come back to join our engineering team full time. He has 9-1-1 and mission critical software development experience along with a great personality. We're very happy that circumstances brought us together again.
In March, Debbie Gilligan, who we've known and worked with for over 13 years, will join John Selters and Janet Baker in Operations/Support. Like many of us here at FirstWatch, Debbie has an EMS and Communications Center background, in addition to experience with 9-1-1 software development. For the last three years, Debbie was with Plant/CML, where she became Program Manager for their Integrated Dispatch Solutions Group, which included CAD. Before Plant, Debbie worked at TriTech, where she held several roles ranging from Support Engineer to Director of Implementation Services.
A topic near and dear to my heart is Uptime. It is important to all of us, but our team will tell you that I am a bit fanatical about it. I am happy to report that in 2007, our overall uptime was 99.993%! That represents three short periods of downtime, all of which were before we had our new primary and secondary sets of servers up and running at the NOC (described in the Winter Newsletter), and before we had all our processes fine-tuned amongst our four different URLs/paths in two separate locations. In fact, since implementing those changes in late July 2007, our uptime has been 100% (knock on wood).
Thanks for your support of FirstWatch! If you have any questions, please feel free to give any of our team, including me, a call anytime. We are happy to help!
Todd Stout, President
P.S. EMS Folks: Please save the dates of July 28 - August 1st for the third annual Pinnacle EMS Leadership Conference here in San Diego. This great conference is put on by Fitch & Associates, and we have found that lots of our FirstWatch customers attend and benefit from it. The actual conference is July 29 - 31. But, there are some great pre-conference workshops on deployment that we're helping with, and Friday morning on August 1, 2008, we will sponsor a three hour FirstWatch mini-users group meeting. We will send a separate announcement out about the user group at Pinnacle as we get the details firmed up. |
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Meet the FirstWatch Team
The FirstWatch team is a small yet very dynamic group. We would like you to meet Janet Baker. Janet has been with us as an Operations Support Technician for the last year and a half. She provides ongoing system training, assists clients with definition and configuration of Triggers, explores new concepts for looking at data, maintains client subscriptions and logins for the system and acts as a liaison between FirstWatch customers and the engineering department.
 "Seeing what our system can do for clients is very rewarding," said Janet. "When we receive feedback that a trigger or the information we provide has managed to help an agency or area to be proactive in addressing health and safety issues, the feeling is one of encouragement and knowledge that we have the ability to provide a tool that can help society. A recent example that comes to mind is the ice storm in Oklahoma. We were able to identify Carbon Monoxide incidents and help the county in recognizing the need to provide warnings and education on CO poisoning to residents in various areas."
Janet is also heading up a new project called the FirstWatch Law Enforcement Users Group, which has become a part of her daily review. She is researching crime analysis and corresponding with clients on how to improve the FirstWatch application to meet the needs of Law Enforcement as well as EMS and Public Safety. The user group allows law enforcement agencies who are currently monitoring data through FirstWatch to collaborate and discuss best practices and potential new tools to use on their data.
Janet was on track to make a career change before she joined the FirstWatch team. "I have always wanted to get into teaching and/or speech therapy, and a few years back, I made the decision to return to school and work on my Masters in Elementary Education. When I came to FirstWatch, I promised Todd I would give him at least two years. As I have been here at the company and learned more, I realized the things I was hoping to accomplish with teaching, I am doing here at FirstWatch. We make a difference in people's lives and family is a priority for everyone here."
Janet Baker can be contacted at 760-943-9123 ext. 207 or by email at jbaker@firstwatch.net
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| Law Enforcement User Group
FirstWatch is proud to announce the creation of the Law Enforcement User Group.The intent of this user group is to help with the day-to-day operations of Law Enforcement Agencies. We will do this by providing a mechanism and forum for FirstWatch Law Enforcement agencies and their crime analysts to promote general best practices, collaborate and share ideas.Through feedback from our Law Enforcement users we can continue to develop tools to better analyze criminal activities, patterns and response times.
"FirstWatch allows us analyze activity in ways that we never could before, identifying trends and patterns in real time. We are excited to work with others in this endeavor and share ideas for using FirstWatch in Law Enforcement," stated Steve Walter, Senior Crime Analyst at Oceanside Police Department.
Through collaborative efforts with our current Law Enforcement users, we have created some unique Triggers to aid in demand analysis and situational awareness. Plano Police Department in Texas uses FirstWatch for not only monitoring crimes but also for monitoring officer response times, vehicle demand analysis and as an event update at officer briefing meetings. "Officers can view in summary and then in detail all of the events that happened in their sector for the past two watches (16 hours). This gives each officer insight on what has happened so that they can discuss these events in a group setting and also be aware what may be overflowing into their watch period," said Pete Pennesi, Crime Analyst of Plano Police Department.
Oceanside Police Department in California has set up Triggers to monitor stolen vehicle and recovered stolen vehicle reports. The Trigger looks for trends by geographic clusters and sends automated notifications to regional auto theft task force members.
The Law Enforcement User Group has been helpful in sharing Trigger ideas. These agencies are already providing great ideas and incredible feedback on uses of their FirstWatch system.
If your agency would like to start monitoring Law Enforcement Data Sources and participate in the newly created Law Enforcement User Group, please contact Janet Baker at 760-943-9123 ext. 207 or by email at jbaker@firstwatch.net
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Carbon Monoxide Trigger
In the Midst of the Oklahoma Ice Storm
By Stephen Dean, Ph.D.
(Click on graph for larger image)
FirstWatch tools helped the Emergency Medical Services Authority of Tulsa, Oklahoma (EMSA) reduce carbon monoxide poisonings during the ice storm which slammed Tulsa on December 10, 2007. Many homes relied upon diesel generators for heat and light during the storm. Consequently, EMSA ambulances responded to a number of carbon monoxide (CO) poisonings, many of which were multi-casualty incidents. Eventually 107 patients were treated or transported during the storm as a result of CO poisoning.
Concerned about the number of incidents from the first day of the storm, officials at EMSA initiated a FirstWatch Sentinel Alert Trigger for all CO poisonings and Hazmat responses according to Kelly Deal, Director of the Metropolitan Medical Response System for EMSA in Tulsa.
On the third day of the storm FirstWatch reports and mapping capabilities were showing the prevalence of carbon monoxide poisoning in Tulsa neighborhoods. Tina Wells, EMSA Vice President of Marketing and Policy Development and EMSA's representative in the city's Joint Information Center, found that that using FirstWatch reports and maps, along with patient care reports, officials were able to quickly determine not only that there was a widespread public health problem but also that a large number of residents in Hispanic neighborhoods were affected.
This sparked an intensive effort to engage the Spanish language media in producing warnings these residents could understand and drove the city to create posters and handouts for display and distribution in convenience stores in both English and Spanish. As a result, the incidence of CO poisonings in the targeted areas decreased dramatically.
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Trigger Spotlight
Innovative New Ideas From Our Customers:
FirstWatch Customer Saves Time, Money and Increases Information Sharing
Garreth Williams, MICP - Cencom Coordinator in Summit, New Jersey, was challenged with providing his multiple customer agencies with call reports for incidents that were dispatched in their respective areas on a daily basis. This process consisted of bringing up a report, setting filter criteria, running the report, validating the information, printing the report and faxing it to each agency. The reports were very time consuming for the dispatcher and were limited to basic incident information. William's quick and efficient Trigger idea was to create a way for each agency to see their respective call information at any time throughout the day with full detail including time-stamps, incident narrative, responding units, integrated GIS mapping for analysis, patient transport destination/distribution, summary graphs and the ability to retrospectively review their information through the use of the FirstWatch Analysis Tool. Williams had a login created for each agency to monitor their data. Now William's dispatch staff is able to concentrate on their very important role of serving their communities. Williams was able to address this need by purchasing one new Trigger and re-allocating Triggers he had already purchased. He calculates that this new Trigger will liberate at least an hour of dispatch time every night, which will pay for the new Trigger in no time.
FirstWatch Increases Situational Awareness with Automated Battalion Chief Notification
Clark County Fire Alarm Office in Nevada provides dispatch services for Clark County Fire Department, City of Las Vegas and the City of North Las Vegas. The standard operating procedure required dispatchers to notify Battalion Chiefs from three different agencies during large-scale events. The dispatch center would typically be extremely busy handling such events that sending out notifications would sometimes get overlooked. Mike Myers, Deputy Chief of the Medical Division of Las Vegas Fire Rescue, and others on a committee thought of FirstWatch as a possible solution to automate a Battalion Chief Notification process for large scale events. FirstWatch worked with the agencies and came up with a Trigger that monitors situations where there are five or more engines assigned to an incident, regardless of what agency or location, and send out a notification to Battalion Chiefs from all three agencies for situational awareness. The Trigger has allowed dispatchers to focus on managing large scale events in a more efficient manner without having to be distracted with sending out manual notifications.
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| New Tools and Enhancement Modules for FirstWatch Systems
The following new tools and enhancement modules are currently being developed to assist FirstWatch customers in automating their manual processes for retrieving, storing and analyzing the data collected within traditional tasks.
Our client in San Francisco has created data collection process using Microsoft Office tools for a small case study to manually document findings and evaluate threats/risks as a result of receiving FirstWatch alerts. Their intention is to have a standardized approach for assessing and ranking the levels of response warranted for each alert. FirstWatch is specifically designing this Threat Assessment Tool for San Francisco, using their existing criteria. This tool will provide a logical extension of the FirstWatch system allowing for an automated link to FirstWatch Trigger alerts for assessment and ranking purposes, which will become a part of the FirstWatch archived records. The information will then be able to be exported or emailed for distribution. The tool will provide various security access levels and can be set to display by score or status of the assessment ranking.
For more information on innovative new Triggers or enhancement modules such as the FirstWatch Demand Analysis Module or Hospital Transport Status dashboard, Please contact John Selters at 760-943-9123 ext. 204 or by email at jselters@firstwatch.net
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Look for FirstWatch at these Upcoming Conferences and Events in Early 2008
- California Police Chiefs Association, Fresno, March 2-6
- EMS Today, Baltimore, March 27-29
- Navigator, Maryland, April 23-25
- ICC, Montreal Canada, May 5-8
- Zoll Summit, Colorado, May 13-16
- CFED, San Diego, May 21-23
- EMSCC, Victoria Canada, May 28-30
- Pinnacle, San Diego, July 29-31
For more information and a full list of conferences Click Here. |
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How are we doing?
Do you have feedback, suggestions or ideas related to your team's innovative use of FirstWatch? Would you like to share ideas with other FirstWatch customers or to be featured in a case study or conference presentation? If so, please contact Marc Baker at 760-943-9123 ext. 208 or by email at mbaker@firstwatch.net
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