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High-performance CAD measures up with Stratus® ftServer® system
Charlotte and the surrounding county of Mecklenburg, N.C. are booming. The area is home to two of the nation’s largest banks, nine Fortune 500 companies, and nearly 750,000 citizens; workday commuters bring the number of people in the county closer to one million. Serving a fast-growing region that’s seeing tremendous change would test any EMS agency. Yet the Mecklenburg Emergency Medical Services Agency answers the call at a level above the norm, measuring up to the best practices and standards of high-performance EMS.
The agency, popularly known as Medic, is the busiest EMS organization in North and South Carolina; it answers more than 70,000 requests for medical assistance annually. Medic responds to all 911 emergency medical calls throughout Charlotte-Mecklenburg: dispatching an ambulance fleet and first responders, in addition to performing EMS and fire dispatch for volunteer fire departments. Medic also provides non-emergency ambulance transport within the county. These uncompromising demands are why Medic relies on Stratus Technologies’ fault-tolerant ftServer® system to power an essential computer-aided dispatch (CAD) application from TriTech Software Systems.
Delivering high-performance EMS
"Not only are we committed to high-performance EMS, but we are also one of a select group of EMS agencies structured in the public utility model," explains Barry Bagwell, communications manager for Mecklenburg EMS Agency. As a result, Medic has a mandate to fulfill high standards of performance and observe established financial controls. Medic also operates its own communications center, or comm center, unlike the more common setup of using a comm center maintained by a law enforcement agency. Medical 911 calls are routed from the primary public safety answering point (PSAP) at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department to Medic’s comm center, which is known as Central Medical Emergency Dispatch (CMED).
When a call arrives at CMED — as many as 300 during any 24-hour period — call takers and nationally certified medical dispatchers have all the information they need to respond. The CAD system continually updates their Windows® PC screens with current information about all calls, the status of all responder units, and maps displaying the locations of all requests and vehicles. In keeping with best practices of high-performance EMS, medics arrive at no less than 90% of calls countywide within target response times. Pre-hospital care is at the nation’s top level.
The agency depends on the outstanding performance of CAD software it has used since 1997, TriTech’s VisiCAD Command™. A few years after going live with the CAD system, however, the area’s rapid population growth brought call volume to a point that required a scheduled upgrade of the underlying hardware.
Medic’s information technology staff set priorities for the upgrade: a reliable Windows server platform that would deliver the additional capacity, complement the TriTech software, and safeguard system uptime. The mission of a comm center simply does not permit risking an unplanned outage of the CAD system.
Reliability plus capacity
The planning involved conversations with other CAD users to learn about approaches that had proven successful at public safety agencies elsewhere. This drew a recent development to the attention of Medic’s IT team. Stratus Technologies had introduced its family of ultra-reliable, Intel® processor-based servers for Microsoft® Windows® server environments. Stratus’ advanced technology made it practical and affordable to replace the agency’s two-server cluster with a single fault-tolerant system.
Industry-standard ftServer systems rival high-availability clusters on price yet are built to support greater reliability. In customer installations, the servers have equaled or surpassed the computer industry’s defining "five nines," or 99.999% availability.
The fault-tolerant Stratus® servers employ duplicated components and software availability features. Even in the event that one part of the server is affected by a problem, these keep ftServer systems online automatically without interruption or performance loss. In contrast, a high-availability cluster relies on complex failover procedures to move processing from a failed server onto a working one. The transition requires some amount of recovery time during which the system is unavailable.
"Others had told us about problems we could be exposed to, depending on the platform we chose for the upgrade," explains Teresa Womble, information technology coordinator responsible for Medic’s comm center network. "The Stratus server is a good match for us because our sensitivity to downtime is such that we prefer not to even mention the word."
The agency wanted to eliminate the possibility of failover, in addition to avoiding the ongoing administration needed to ensure that a multi-server cluster is properly configured for high availability. The nod went to a Stratus ftServer system for all these reasons.
Making seconds count
A fault-tolerant system that is maintained like an ordinary Windows server brings further advantages. Not only does pairing excellent reliability with operational efficiency minimize total cost of ownership, but it helps free up time for Bagwell and his staff. They have been able to turn their attention to other strategic projects, such as custom development of a mobile data system that works seamlessly with the CAD system. The mobile data system trims crucial seconds from average response time by using an automated vehicle locator (AVL) to track units, global positioning satellite (GPS) technology to route those vehicles, and mobile status terminals that provide call details and a map displaying the fastest route to the scene.
As is characteristic of the best high-performance EMS organizations, Medic uses knowledgeable technology choices to help meet committed service levels while keeping costs down. EMS providers understand that reliability matters when protecting health and life. "The best possible story we could tell is that the server does what it is supposed to do, and that has been the case with our Stratus ftServer system," Bagwell says.
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