Kansas City, Mo., Fire Department Upgrades Record Management, Dispatch Systems

The city of Kansas City, Mo., Fire Department has installed new Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and Records Management Systems (RMS). The system is the first phase of an $8.6 million contract with CompuDyne for new public safety systems for the city's police and fire departments.

"Installing a reliable system is critical to any public safety operation," says Rick Brisbin, project manager for the city of Kansas City. "We have not experienced any downtime since we took the system live." In addition to improving efficiency, the new dispatch system includes a comprehensive mapping component that pinpoints the exact location of a citizen's call for service. This map then provides dispatchers the ability to quickly assess the location of the incident and provide responding firefighters directions or details of the building, if required. With a couple of keystrokes, the new CAD system automatically pinpoints the caller's location, recommends appropriate apparatus to respond, alerts the fire stations and tracks the details of the response.

And while records automation is not new to the Kansas City Fire Department, which currently processes more than 50,000 fire and rescue incident reports annually, the department needed a more robust, fully integrated system to bring together fire incident, personnel and training, and equipment inspections information that used to reside in disparate locations.

Subsequent to updating the record management system and the CAD system, the fire department will be adding vehicle tracking capability which will ensure that fire vehicles arrive at the incident promptly.

Later in the project, the city will implement a comprehensive CAD, RMS and automated field reporting system for the police department. "The installation of the fire dispatch and records management system is the beginning of an enterprise-wide public safety automation system for the city's police and fire departments," says Brisbin. "Sharing information between police and fire is crucial to rapid responses, and is the big payoff of this new system for the departments."