Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the way Israelis receive attention from their police, fire and rescue, and emergency medical services.
Israelis enjoy direct access to their police, to Fire and Rescue Services, and to Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel’s Red Cross and emergency medical services. Dial 100 and they get police; 101 and MDA is on the way; 102 and fire rescue is on the move.
“The new interconnect will save time and potentially lives,” said Ido Rosenblat, MDA’s chief information officer, who oversaw MDA’s role in the initiative. “Previously, the protocol for us to contact police or fire services was sequential, meaning we’d dispatch our ambulances and Medicycles and then contact the other agencies.”
“We’ve long believed that having separate numbers for police, EMS, and fire rescue, has been an advantage for callers in an emergency,” said Eli Bin, director-general of Magen David Adom. “In a medical emergency, for example, callers are instantly connected to an EMT or paramedic, who can provide lifesaving medical instructions to the caller while the ambulance is dispatched.”
While callers in Israel only have to call one number for any emergency, it is incumbent on the police, fire service, or MDA to call or radio the other agencies if the emergency requires their response as well. But now artificial intelligence has streamlined that process.
The interconnect was developed by the in-house programming unit at Magen David Adom. It will speed the flow of information between all three rescue services in emergencies requiring multiple agencies.
Under the system’s design, entering the nature of an emergency into any of the service’s computer-assisted dispatch (CAD) systems will determine which agencies are dispatched.
A call to MDA regarding someone injured in a shooting, for example, would automatically summon both an ambulance and the police. Likewise, reporting an apartment fire to the Israel Fire and Rescue Services would summon personnel from all three services — firefighters to address the blaze itself, police to control street traffic, and ambulances to treat anyone potentially injured.
Similar sequential processes would happen at the Israel Police or at Israel Fire and Rescue if they were first called, but determined other agencies needed to be dispatched too.
“Now,” Rosenblat explained, “the process is simultaneous, meaning that police, fire, or ambulances are dispatched at the same time — and from any of the three agencies — automatically if the emergency dictates a multi-agency response.
“That’s a huge timesaver, one that will bring a more robust emergency response more quickly to the scene, and free up dispatchers to spend more time counseling the caller and providing them with better service.”
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Magen David Adom is Israel’s national paramedic and Red Cross service. A leader in mass-casualty response and in EMS technology, Magen David Adom treats and transports nearly
1 million people to hospitals every year, collects, safety tests, and distributes nearly all the blood to Israel’s hospitals, and, through its affiliation with the Red Cross movement, responds to disasters around the world.