Hacker News Reader

Comment by trisomy21 | Hacker News Reader

This is really interesting. I know it's not a replacement for it, but 911 seems so inefficient and outdated to me today. I'm excited to see how this company progresses. Small improvements here can really save lives.

View on HN

It's not going to seem so outdated when you or one of your loved ones has a heart attack, and the ambulance is rushing him to the hospital where an interventional cardiologist is going to unblock his/her heart arteries in an operating room.

I think the EMS system does what it can for our patients, and paramedics save lives. As an ED doc and resident, I served as med control for EMS and saw first hand all of the difficulties they have with an outdated system created in the late '60s. Like most industries, there is lots of room for improvement, and being scared of change should not hold us back from exploring how we can save even more lives and help more people.

Well, one of the reasons why the medical response aspects of 911 feel so outdated and inefficient to me is because the system has to treat all calls as if they are life threatening heart attacks, when most often they are not.

Right, so this startup introduces an additional delay / filter before 911 is called. I would not want that for my loved ones in an emergency.

Surely your right to not use our product. But, we've already saved lives, decreased transport times, identified conditions in patients that otherwise would have been ignored (because we have doctors doing the assessment, not bystanders/nurses/EMS). The way the system works is that there are many triage steps before a patient ever sees a doctor - we've flipped that model and put the physician (who is ultimately the one making the medical decision) as the first step rather than the last. To us (and our patients), it just makes sense.

So you would rather speak to a dispatcher who is, at best, trained as an EMT first instead of an actual emergency physician? All the next steps (dispatching an actual ambulance) are exactly the same in the Call 9 model and the traditional 911 model.

That is definitely not the case.

The system does no such thing. Criteria-based dispatch is a powerful tool. Many counties also require Fire/EMS dispatchers to be trained as EMTs.

Expert systems help ask the appropriate questions to establish the base complaint, and the level of service needed, the response level, lights/sirens, what-have-you.

See: http://www.kingcounty.gov/healthservices/health/ems/communit...

It's great to hear that some counties require fire/EMS dispatchers to be EMTs, but wouldn't it be better if the dispatcher was an actual emergency physician? I don't actually see this as disrupting 911 as much as it is disrupting the traditional dispatch system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com