A survey of 911 dispatchers reveals the cost of bad technology

Do you have a source for this? As far as I know this is not true. They use signal strength and knowledge of cell tower antenna locations, but not time of flight of the radio signal, as GPS does.

Its not just 911 calls from cell phones, its the whole stack. This will hopefully illustrate the problems we have;

Last night we were dispatched to an MVA (accident) with injuries. The 911 call came in from a passer by on a cell phone, but gave the wrong address.

A police officer near by, responded as well. When the officer arrived, he told Dispatch that the accident was on XYZ st. Dispatch corrected our address on our MDT (the computer in the Engine) and updated over the radio. We drove to the intersection, but couldn't find the accident.

I am the driver of the engine, so I ask my Captain if we should just head south a litter further to gain some elevation and look for lights. This is all while making appropriate radio transmissions. We drive a little further south up a small hill and find the Accident. The accident is on the street the officer said it was on. Dispatch didn't have an updated map that reflected the connection of two streets and the streets name change. They had dispatched us to the old intersection.

We were delayed about 4 minutes and the injuries were not serious, thankfully. However, this is pretty common.

We have two laptops on every truck. We have a brand new digital radio system. We have a year old CAD (dispatch) software package. We use electronic patient reporting and transmit full telemetries (patient reports) via a shitty web app.

Our laptops do not cross pollenate (share data). Our radio system doesn't work with police unless we coordinate beforehand or activate the MMRS system which is reserved for homeland security type events. The radio system has all kinds of other problems, it is fully software defined radio. Our patient data from the EKG monitors do not talk to the EPCR (electronic patient...) software. Our EPCR data does not cross pollenate with the shitty web app for transmission to the hospitals. CAD; Maps are a cluster f* and its too expensive to use Google maps apparently. The CAD software has all kinds of bugs for data extraction Ie. calls are doubled, missing and more.

Believe it or not we have Fire/EMS departments from around the country visiting us as we are very, very advanced in terms of technology in the Fire/EMS service. I've made two android apps for our department to use, an easy SOP reader and a Fire pump calculator. I am actively trying to come up with solutions to fix our problems via MORE! software...haha

Then the feature would be useful in day to day life and would be well supported. We have to stop treating emergency communications as something special. The actual problem here is a lack of proper standards.

In the case of the former, I wonder if OpenStreetMap is any better than CAD Maps' existing map source.