About Beacon

Yes, always! Please send us an email if you’re interested in getting involved with our software development team.

In addition to the limitations above that come with texting, these kind of apps have additional problems when it comes to emergency dispatching.

For one, using third-party apps, e.g,. WhatsApp or Facebook, may make sensitive data available to non-authorized parties or inaccessible to authorized parties.

Even when secure, the real problem is scalability: a Twitter list or a WhatsApp chat group may be able to alert multiple responders to a single emergency, but dispatching the same responders to multiple incidents in different locations at the same time is far more difficult with these apps. Beacon’s dynamic allocation algorithm knows how to efficiently manage emergency first responders to get them where they need to be.

Yes, it can and it is! There is an asterisk to this claim, however — Beacon can be used by fire departments to dispatch personnel and equipment to the scene of an emergency, and it can coordinate their response efforts as they’re related to getting resources on-scene and requesting more, but Beacon does not help fire department manage fireground operations for involved structure or wildland fires. That requires radios, among other more advanced technologies.

It can and it is, but we don’t pretend that Beacon was designed for police dispatching – it wasn’t. It just happens that sometimes Beacon’s a better solution than other existing dispatching software for police. Emergency medical dispatching is different than police dispatching in the fact that persons with medical emergencies are often easily convinced to stay and wait for first responders; criminal suspects on the other hand may be more difficult to persuade. This means that police are better served by more dynamic communications than text messages, including radios. Beacon is used by law enforcement in two countries to inform officers of the location of medical emergencies, and police officers also relay incidents they hear about to local dispatchers using Beacon, but at present the platform was not intended for police to use as their first-line dispatching solution.

No – not yet, at least. Beacon can’t replace radios at the moment, but it can drastically reduce the amount of chatter that typically occurs between dispatchers and responders by eliminating the need for redundant communications about predictable steps — for example, “Are you responding?” “Are you there yet?” “Do you need more help?” “Are you transporting?” “Where to?” etc. This frees up radios to be reserved for communications outside the standard commands and reduces the risks of open-mics, drained batteries, and poor radio signals.

Not necessarily, though we definitely recommend using the mobile app version where possible. In order to keep SMS costs low for services that don’t enjoy internet messaging, there are a range of tactics that can be employed to make sure that the right number of SMS are being sent:

1. Only include active responders – if they aren’t participating they are a big source of waste so should be removed from distribution lists
2. Optimize the level of coverage in each community — Match the number of responders needed to the actual call volume in order to maintain efficient resource allocation
3. Introduce Beacon training at the very outset — There’s no reason why Beacon can’t be incorporated in medical training from the outset; not only does it reduce the number of errors made during regular operations, but it also helps to slow nervous and inexperienced responders down who are prone to make mistakes in high-pressure settings

There are two ways to understand how you can implement and use the Beacon Dispatch platform:

HORIZONTAL IMPLEMENTATION:

1. Emergency Response – The transport of sick and injured patients from the home or the street to the hospital

2. Inter-Facility Transfers –The transport of sick and injured patients from one healthcare facility to another (also referred to as “patient referrals”)

3. Patient Discharges — The transport of sick and injured patients from a healthcare facility to their home

4. Community Paramedicine — The delivery of care in patients’ homes

VERTICAL IMPLEMENTATION

1. Prehospital Emergency Care – To support emergency medical services (EMS), fire departments, and other first responder agencies

2. Emergency Obstetrics – To support maternal child health programs improving access to emergency care and transport for pregnant women and newborns

3. Patient Referral Networks – To support the reliable transfer of patients between healthcare facilities providing appropriate levels of care

4. Disease Outbreak Surveillance – To support the reliable and regular collection of public health risks at the local level

5. Post-Crash Response – To support the reliable location, retrieval and transport of road users suffering injuries from motor vehicle collisions

6. Disaster Response – To enable the rapid deployment and management of responders and resources in austere environments

7. Persons with Disabilities – To improve access to inclusive services for patients with special needs

Yes, of course! Beacon was designed so that any person carrying a mobile phone could be dispatched to an emergency. Any vehicle will help get you to the location, and because Beacon communicates with mobile phones (and not mobile data terminals) whatever vehicle you use to transport to the hospital can be coordinated and tracked as well.

REQUIRED RESOURCES

1. Proven management
2. Trained responders
3. Adequate transportation
4. A phone number that the public can call to request assistance (preferably toll-free, but not necessary)
5. A reliable mobile phone signal*

*To use the mobile app version, you will also need reliable 3G/4G/Internet connectivity

Beacon’s costs are based on a number of factors:

1. Message handling — are you managing the message server locally or using our remote providers>?
2. Call volume — How many incidents do you expect per month?
3. Responder volume — How many responders will be involved?
4. Technical support — How capable are you of managing the system on your own?
5. Customizations — How much custom work and configurations do you need?

All of these factors are bundled in a monthly or annual fee which includes use of all updates, enhancements and add-ons.

Beacon is a text message-based emergency dispatching platform designed specifically for communities with limited access to emergency care and transport.

Beacon enables to communities to leverage their own resources in order to design, launch, manage and sustain their own emergency response networks on any phone, with or without internet connection, and anywhere there’s a mobile phone signal.

1. English
2. Spanish
3. French
4. Haitian Creole
5. Swahili
6. German
7. Nepali
8. Arabic
9. Somali
10. Chichewa

Beacon has been designed specifically for emergency dispatching in resource-limited settings, and with the flexibility to meet those challenges, however they may present. To make this possible, we designed Beacon with certain principles to ensure the most flexible, yet robust solution on the market:

1. Beacon can be used via SMS or a mobile app or both, making it possible to use Beacon with or without internet connectivity
2. Beacon can be used as a standalone dispatching system (e.g., for a rural community with no existing communications system) or it can also be used to seamlessly integrate with existing dispatching setups (e.g., CADs) in order to expand their coverage beyond official vehicles only
3. Beacon can be set up and disassembled in a matter of minutes for temporary or short-term deployments, or it can be installed on remote and/or local servers for permanent operations
4. Beacon takes just a few minutes to learn for someone with only a basic understanding of how to read and reply to text messages
5. Beacon can easily accommodate small response groups while also scaling to national-level emergency services with little extra reconfiguration needed

If you’ve ever used Uber or Lyft, you know that these ride-sharing apps use GPS to find the driver that’s closest to you, so it makes sense that Beacon should be able to do that, too, right?

Not exactly.

There are several reasons why Beacon doesn’t use the GPS location of Responders to decide who’s closest:

1. Not all Responders have smartphones and/or Internet connectivity all the time. If Beacon only relied on GPS locations, then Responders using Beacon via SMS would never get assigned to incidents because Beacon wouldn’t know their location
2. Beacon doesn’t know where you are unless you have your phone turned on and the Beacon app open in the foreground. As soon as you turn the phone off, lock the phone screen, put the app in the background or swipe close it, Android and iOS no longer allow apps to track your location. As a result, once the Beacon mobile app is no longer open and in the foreground, Beacon only knows your last reported location, which may or may not be your current location.
3. Uber and Lyft drivers do it to get paid, while many Beacon users are volunteers. This makes a big difference: When an Uber or Lyft driver gets assigned to a call, they usually take it because that’s how they make money. If you’re using Broadcast Alerts in Beacon, it’s very likely you’re working with volunteer Responders. And as we all know is the case with volunteers, they often get alerts for emergency incidents that they don’t respond to — even if they’re the closest person to the incident. So, telling the closest Responders to an incident that they’re needed, only to learn that they’re not going to respond, is just a huge waste of time.
4. Hailing a taxi is a fairly simple transaction; when someone asks for a taxi, they only need one vehicle to come pick them up. Emergency dispatching is very different. For starters, not all emergencies are the same. If someone slips and falls, you may only need one ambulance to respond. But for a motor vehicle collision with multiple victims, you’ll likely need more resources. While it’s possible in theory to automate all of the different response combinations that exist, we’ll be very impressed to see it when it happens. Until then, we’ll rely on Dispatchers to figure out the type of resources they’ll need for each incident, and then let Responders decide if they can or can’t go.

The bottom line is: Don’t be fooled by how “easy” technological solutions look at face value. It may be easy to compare emergency response apps to pizza delivery apps, but in reality, it’s a lot more complicated than that. Anybody who wants to make that comparison has never worked in an emergency service.

The presence of a human dispatcher provides multiple advantages that are lost when channeled through an automated app:

1. Real-time feedback between caller and dispatcher
2. Ability to provide pre-arrival instructions over the phone much more easily
3. Talking on phone allows caller to keep their eyes on the scene of the emergency (and not the phone screen)
4. Dispatchers are able to pick up on context and background info (vs. trying to interpret text messages)
5. If you’re texting you can’t be giving CPR — but you can if it’s on speakerphone