EMS Technology is Evolving to Ease, and Eventually End, Billing Woes

A previous post touched upon the difficulties that emergency medical service (EMS) agencies experience when trying to bill and then collect payment for the services that they provide. Those difficulties are considerable and have plagued the sector for as long as EMS has existed. Hundreds of millions of dollars go uncollected across the sector each year. For instance, an EMS study for one of MCP's clients wrote off $7 million last year because of an inability to bill for EMS services. That’s a big number.

Many EMS agencies across the United States are in similar circumstances. This makes it much more difficult for agencies to maintain their service-delivery models, pay salaries and benefits, ensure that existing equipment is operational, and upgrade or replace equipment that has reached or is approaching end of life.

Life at MCP: Meet Joe Wheeler, VP of Justice and Courts

Over the last two years, Mission Critical Partners has grown significantly through acquisition, starting with Athena Advanced Networks in 2018, and continuing with Black & Veatch Public Safety and URL Integration last year. Last month, MCP announced its latest acquisition, Seattle-based MTG Management Consultants. The subject-matter experts who are joining MCP will enable us to better serve clients in the public-safety and justice communities by helping them enhance data integration and address their technology challenges.

MCP Makes Best-of-Breed Technology Procurements Easy and Painless

Since the firm’s launching 12 years ago, Mission Critical Partners has participated in hundreds of technology procurements. We are proud that our clients trust the support that we provide. The foundation for that trust can be found in two important factors.

Be Wary of Using Commercial Broadband Networks for Public Safety Voice

More than ever, broadband communications networks are essential to the public safety and justice communities. Such networks easily transmit highly bandwidth-intensive files, e.g., video and building floor plans, that would choke a narrowband network. Such files enhance situational awareness for incident commanders and other officials—as well as emergency responders and jail/prison officers—by orders of magnitude, which in turn helps them do their jobs better.

But there’s a flip side to broadband communications networks of which the public safety community needs to take seriously. Such networks typically are owned and operated by commercial entities, and because of this public safety agencies that contract for broadband services typically do not receive the performance guarantees and—even more importantly—the visibility into these networks that they’re used to receiving from the networks that they own and operate, for example, their land mobile radio (LMR) systems.

Consequently, public safety agencies should proceed carefully when they consider whether to contract with any commercial entity for broadband services.

A Few Thoughts on Data Integration for Public Safety Agencies

There was a time, not that long ago, when voice communications were king in the public safety community, and data communications were an afterthought. This largely was driven by the limitations of narrowband wireless systems. In the earliest days of data communications, such systems delivered throughput rates of 9,600 baud, which enabled the equivalent of text messages. Things improved a bit when data generated to and from field personnel was transmitted via air cards provisioned by commercial wireless carriers, but only modestly—the largest files that could be transmitted then were mug shots, and they often took a long time to arrive, if they arrived at all.

Policies and Training are Critical to Effective Body-Worn Camera Usage

The Chicago Sun-Times recently published a story that provides a cautionary tale that should be heeded by any law enforcement agency that is providing, or thinking of providing, body-worn cameras to its sworn officers.

Public Safety Needs a Better Way to Triage Emergency Calls

At MCP, our mission is to help clients improve emergency response outcomes.

Depending on the client and its unique environment and resources, this could mean providing guidance regarding technology, operations or governance, and often all three. The overarching goal is to ensure that 911 callers receive the most appropriate emergency response as quickly as possible. Lives often are on the line in an emergency, and every second matters.

Achieving a balance between sending the optimal response to an emergency and having it arrive as fast as possible is tricky. In fact, it is analogous to walking a tightrope. To achieve the former, many emergency communications centers (ECCs) rely on standard protocols developed for each type of emergency call that they receive, typically law enforcement, fire/rescue and emergency medical services.

Cybersecurity Threat Advisory: Cyberthreats Affecting the United States Presidential Election

As part of our effort to inform our clients about potential and serious cybersecurity issues, MCP provides advisories about vulnerabilities and exploits that could threaten the operations of their critical communications networks. Sign up to receive these advisories in your inbox as soon as they are released.

Resources to Get Your Agency Across the NIBRS Transition Finish Line

Considerable inconsistency traditionally has existed in terms of how law enforcement agencies from coast to coast gather and report crime data, as well as the types of data captured. The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) was created to address that shortcoming.

NIBRS has defined standard ways of describing an incident, and collecting the data associated with it, so that apples-to-apples comparisons can be made at the national level. The idea is that, to truly have a national picture of crime in the U.S., data has to be collected in the same manner, using the same nomenclature, from the country’s largest law-enforcement agency—the New York City Police Department—to its smallest.

Is a Storm Brewing in Your Cloud?

The COVID-19 global pandemic has thrust cloud computing into the spotlight, with everything from primary education, to business meetings, to government operations moving “into the cloud.” We’ve highlighted how the benefits of cloud-based applications are clear: lower total cost of ownership, enhanced scalability and flexibility, and the ability to shift the maintenance responsibility to the service provider. Cloud-based applications are easy to update, are available anywhere network connectivity exists, and often are more secure and reliable than a premises-based solution.

An Effective Network Operations Center Does More Than Provide Alerts

A while back, one of Mission Critical Partners' (MCP's) long-standing clients, the Lower Rio Grande Valley Development Council (LRGVDC) in Texas, was growing increasingly frustrated with its third-party network operations center (NOC). It always is good for an emergency-response organization to enlist the services of a NOC to ensure the reliability of its mission-critical communications networks and systems and to perform network troubleshooting. But in this case, the NOC’s performance was insufficient, according to Hector Chapa, program supervisor II, who oversees the council’s communications systems and emergency communications center (ECC) ECC operations.

An Effective Way to Improve Evidence Management

An axiom within the criminal-justice community is that the more evidence that can be captured and leveraged by the prosecution, the better. Corollary to that axiom, however, is that evidence—regardless of type or quantity—has no utility if it is not easily accessed and shared, or worse, somehow falls through the cracks. The way to prevent such problems from occurring is to deploy a digital evidence management solution, or DEMS.