Across every industry, accreditation programs promote superior products and services, and are generally recognized as a pinnacle of professional excellence. For example, organizations such as the CALEA (the Commission on Accredited Law Enforcement Association) and the International Association of Emergency Medical Dispatch (IAED) both offer accreditation for emergency communication centers.
Is your 911 center accredited, or seeking accreditation? NICE Inform can help your center provide superior service, and secure and maintain accreditation in these three standards' areas:
- Quality Checks – NICE Inform Evaluator can formalize and automate your Quality Assurance and Improvement (QA/QI) program in the following ways:
- Documented quality checks of employee call-taking and dispatch performance – NICE automatically reconstructs and schedules for quality evaluation recordings of entire incidents (consisting of both the 911 call and dispatch radio communications). The NICE solution comes with the six APCO/NENA ANSI QA standard call taking and dispatching evaluation forms (which can be easily modified if desired) and provides interactive quality assurance performance reports.
- Frequency and quantity of quality checks – NICE leverages CAD data integration to automatically, and randomly schedule two percent of all EMD, police and fire calls for each telecommunicator (as suggested in the APCO/NENA ANSI QA standard). It can also automatically find and schedule one hundred percent of all high acuity/priority incidents for QA review. Calls can be assigned to individual evaluators or a team of evaluators (who can collaboratively evaluate the calls in the queue). Armed with these tools, your QA reviewers can complete three times the number of QA reviews.
- Process for telecommunicator feedback – automated emails are sent to telecommunicators immediately when QA evaluations have been completed. Telecommunicators then review the completed evaluations and can sign off on (or dispute) them.
- Management reporting and review process – NICE Inform provides management with interactive quality assurance status and staff performance trending reports (with drill-through functionality to assist in diagnosing specific policy issues or training deficiencies).
- Documented quality checks of employee call-taking and dispatch performance – NICE automatically reconstructs and schedules for quality evaluation recordings of entire incidents (consisting of both the 911 call and dispatch radio communications). The NICE solution comes with the six APCO/NENA ANSI QA standard call taking and dispatching evaluation forms (which can be easily modified if desired) and provides interactive quality assurance performance reports.
- Public Disclosure/Audio Requests – NICE Inform Organizer automates and speeds up fulfilling audio records requests.
- High level of service – NICE leverages CAD data integration to automatically pull together all media and events related to an incident, including traditional and NG911 call and radio audio, text-to-911, RapidSOS location data, and related CAD data, and incident response events. You can add reports, photos, video clips, audio, and virtually any other third-party content (including accident or crime scene evidence from mobile phones) to incident folders. You can also easily and securely share the complete incident package electronically, with a self-contained media player that helps the recipient view and play back audio recordings and other multimedia synchronously from a timeline. With NICE Inform, your center can cut the time it takes to fulfill records requests in half, and eliminate the need to print out reams of paper.
- Records organization & tracking – Organize incident folders by CAD incident ID or court case number for fast searching. Avoid having to perform the same work over and over when duplicate requests come in. NICE Inform even tracks chain of custody for every record.
- High level of service – NICE leverages CAD data integration to automatically pull together all media and events related to an incident, including traditional and NG911 call and radio audio, text-to-911, RapidSOS location data, and related CAD data, and incident response events. You can add reports, photos, video clips, audio, and virtually any other third-party content (including accident or crime scene evidence from mobile phones) to incident folders. You can also easily and securely share the complete incident package electronically, with a self-contained media player that helps the recipient view and play back audio recordings and other multimedia synchronously from a timeline. With NICE Inform, your center can cut the time it takes to fulfill records requests in half, and eliminate the need to print out reams of paper.
- Performance Measures – The NICE Inform Intelligence Center performance dashboards track all metrics in a single place automatically, making them available on-demand and avoiding human error associated with reporting from different systems and spreadsheets.
- Comprehensive performance measurement program – NICE consolidates data from CAD, telephony, radio, text-to-911 and more, automatically calculating metrics to provide historical and real-time views of performance across multiple dimensions:
- Calls answered
- Abandoned calls
- Calls resulting in a dispatch
- Call durations and hold times
- Time-to-answer
- Time-to-enter
- Dispatch times
- On-scene response times, and many other metrics
- Root cause analysis – NICE Inform also offers the ability for managers to drill down to expose root causes of anomalies exposed in dashboard charts. For example, you can drill down from the data to play back associated audio recordings or view detailed QA evaluation ratings, for a better understanding of what happened.
- Comprehensive performance measurement program – NICE consolidates data from CAD, telephony, radio, text-to-911 and more, automatically calculating metrics to provide historical and real-time views of performance across multiple dimensions:
More and more centers are seeking accreditation these days to enhance service capacities and effectiveness, serve as a tool for policy decisions and management, promote transparency and community trust, and establish a platform for continuous review. But preparing for and maintaining accreditation can be time-consuming and difficult. If your center is looking to pave a path to excellence through accreditation, NICE can help make the process easier by automating the manual work around quality assurance, fulfilling public disclosure/audio records requests and performance measurement reporting.