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News release
06/13/2005
Kanawha County Implements AVL With Sweet-CAD
(Charleston, WV) Kanawha County Emergency Ambulance Authority (KCEAA) has implemented the Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) functionality within Sweet-CAD™ to track its fleet of vehicles. AVL functionality is embedded within Sweet-CAD so the implementation of the added functionality was nearly transparent to the system users. Dispatchers now have a clear picture of the locations of all their vehicles 24/7.
KCEAA was an early adopter of Sweet-CAD, going live on the system in July of 2004. Following the successful implementation of Sweet-CAD, KCEAA began working with Cingular™ (then ATT Wireless™) and Enfora™ to assemble a hardware and networking package that would transmit the necessary location information from the vehicles to Sweet-CAD.
The Enfora Spyder MT was selected as the embedded Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver to be used in the vehicles. The receivers are configured to communicate with Sweet-CAD over the Cingular GSM network. The location data is passed directly from the vehicles to the Sweet-CAD installation at KCEAA with no third party software or servers involved.
KCEAA began preliminary testing of the network in early May, and in mid-May began a phased roll-out to the fleet. KCEAA will have about 48 units that they will be tracking, including ambulances, vans and supervisors.
Jeff Harbour, EMT-P and Communications Director for KCEAA, has already experienced some benefits of the AVL component in their operations. “Last week, I had two trucks telling me they were closer to an MVC than each other. AVL and mapping ended the dispute and made the dispatcher’s decision easy. It cut down on radio traffic and you can’t dispute it.” KCEAA is somewhat unique as they operate three different divisions; one of them, a multi-passenger van/wheelchair service, is stand-alone from the others. “This service has grown 34% in the past 12 months,” Jeff explained, “and anything we can do to operate more efficiently gets our attention. AVL is one of those tools.”
Sweet-CAD is a map-centric Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) program, designed specifically for Emergency Medical Service (EMS) agencies. Sweet-CAD was launched in 2004, and is now used by over 30 EMS agencies.
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About Ortivus:
Ortivus offers integrated software solutions for Emergency Medical Services and Public Safety. The North American Subsidiary develops and markets the following pre-hospital applications: EMS billing, patient care reporting, computer-aided dispatch, automatic vehicle location, mobile data application, and patient vital signs monitoring and data transmission.
The Ortivus vision is to be the customer’s preferred provider of integrated information and decision-making software support systems in the Emergency Medical Service, Public Safety and Healthcare industries.
Ortivus operates out of two North American corporate office locations (Decorah, Iowa, US and Montreal, Quebec, Canada), as well as several international locations (Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Great Britain).