Sooner or later, everything evolves. Usually, the evolution is driven by necessity — adapt or die. But sometimes it stems from a desire to build a better mousetrap.
During the recent trade show and educational conference presented by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials in Baltimore, MCP and The Monitoring Association (TMA) hosted a lunch-and-learn event regarding the Automated Secure Alarm Protocol (ASAP). The panel included me and the following:
In 2011, TMA and APCO collaborated to develop the ASAP 2 PSAP standard as the first step toward easing the burden of phone calls generated by alarm-monitoring centers that typically are delivered to 911 centers via 10-digit administrative lines. Since then, a lot of evolution has occurred, with all the changes falling under the “build a better mousetrap” category.
The first leap forward was ASAP Service, which leverages the protocol to digitally deliver those notifications automatically and directly to the emergency communications center (ECC) computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, with all information needed by ECC telecommunicators — including the severity of the incident — to dispatch the appropriate emergency response. This saves about two minutes on average per call, a significant amount of time during emergencies when lives are at stake and every second matters. Before ASAP Service, 911 telecommunicators handled as many as five voice calls from and to alarm-monitoring center personnel to gather the needed information. This is time-consuming and prone to errors.
The next advancement was TMA’s development of the Alarm Verification Scoring standard (ANSI/TMA AVS-01), which identifies five scoring levels to help telecommunicators prioritize the severity of an alarm/sensor notification, which speeds dispatch of the most appropriate response. The more time saved, the more lives and property saved.
A huge development occurred just last month with TMA’s announcement that ECCs now can access ASAP Service hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud platform. This is a game changer. Previously, ECCs needed a connection to a state message switch to access ASAP, which was a barrier to entry because many states had not developed an ASAP interface or were very slow to respond to requests from ECCs for such connectivity.
The new ASAP platform streamlines and shortens implementations dramatically. Other advantages include:
Upon learning of this development during the lunch-and-learn event, one public-safety official who was mulling an ASAP implementation simply uttered, “I’m good” and has since created a purchase order to move forward with implementation.
Finally, the panelists spent time discussing TMA’s newest initiative which is the soon-to-be released Active Threat Detection (ATN-01) standard, which builds upon AVS-01. Here’s what MCP’s John Chiaramonte, president of the firm’s consulting division, wrote about this development in a recent blog:
Both AVS-01 and ATN-01 are scoring frameworks that enable telecommunicators to determine the severity of an alarm notification. Whereas AVS-01 is focused on notifications generated by residential and commercial alarm systems, ATN-01 expands the scope to school panic alarms, gunshot-detection systems, and mass-notification platforms, other Internet-of-Things (IoT) safety sensors, and more. Together, ATN-01 and AVS-01 promise to improve emergency-response speed and outcomes dramatically.
TMA expects the standards-development process for ATN-01 to be completed in the next 60 days.
If there’s an underlying theme to this blog, it is this: TMA continues to work tirelessly, now with MCP’s support, to continue to make ASAP Service even more accessible, effective, and to make implementations of this vital solution faster and easier.
As the ASAP standard continues to be expanded by a working group of ECC, monitoring center and vendor representatives, I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
Karen Carlson is vice president and general manager of MCP’s Automated Secure Alarm Protocol (ASAP) program. Email her at KarenCarlson@asap911.org.