Improving the Public Safety Response

About the Program

Category: Criminal Justice and Public Safety (Best in Category)

Year: 2010

Lexington County EMS, much like many county EMS systems, is facing rising call volumes each year. County governments therefore need to find new and innovative ways to address the increasing demand for services while utilizing existing resources. Lexington County EMS is creating capacity to run more calls with the same resources through the use of GIS technology. Knowing where the county’s calls for service have occurred in the past and being able to display a visual representation of those locations allows for better resource placement and pre-staging of ambulances in high demand areas. Additionally, we use smart routing technology combined with GIS data to maximize our response times, as well as increase and improve the amount of decision making intelligence data available to emergency responders in the field. This increased data allows incident commanders to make better, safer and faster decisions to more efficiently mitigate the emergency. Although call volumes have increased an average of seven percent each year, out average response times have remained consistent since the implementation of this program in late 2006 with no increase in the average number of available ambulances in service each day.