The Drive to Save Lives

Continued

An Aggressive Schedule

Considerably less than a year, in fact. With a very short launch time—100 days—the team that planned EMRI faced three big challenges: how to establish partnerships that would create a comprehensive response system, how to determine which technologies and processes would best serve the goal of saving lives, and how to best work with the government to designate a single, toll-free emergency number.

Changavalli and his team began to talk with potential public and private partners. They garnered a commitment of emergency response participation and cooperation from Andhra Pradesh, India's fifth-largest state in terms of both geography and population. They have signed memorandums of understanding with 802 hospitals, committing them to free, short-term emergency healthcare. They also worked quickly to establish 1-0-8 as the dedicated emergency number.

A team of IT professionals provided by Satyam Computer began assessing technologies. Three big-picture processes emerged: sensing (receiving the call, collecting facts, assigning response), reaching (emergency responders arriving at the scene), and caring (providing pre-hospital emergency care while transporting patients). Voice over IP capacity was a logical choice, although there is as yet no legal mandate that cell phone providers must divulge location. Computer telephony integration, voice loggers, interactive voice response, geographic information systems, and global positioning systems were other obvious technology choices, given the need for distress communication and management. More-surprising choices included Oracle Financials, Oracle Human Capital Management, and Oracle Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

"Generally in nonprofits, you won't find these kinds of applications," notes Changavalli. "I was the CEO of a German multinational for 11 years before coming here. Ramalinga wanted this to be run with the kind of performance measures, marketing strategies, customer orientation, and partnerships that a for-profit organization would have. Whereas in another organization, a failure would cause loss of a customer, here failure causes a death.

"Why CRM? Because our patients are our customers, and the hospitals that receive those patients are also our customers. We keep track of which hospitals our patients are going to so that if one hospital receives more of our patients more often, we spend more time with that partner, understanding the processes and challenges so the interface will become easier in the future. Then we have our government and alliance partners in the field of emergency medicine, and we also have U.S. partners that share practices and training. These are all our customers."

A Data-Driven System

Automating back-office functions was considered essential for consistency and speed as well as for the very detailed tracking available on 1-0-8 calls, says Anil Jampala, EMRI's CIO. "You name any parameter in this process of sensing, reaching, and caring, and it comes in a report every day," he says. It also facilitates Changavalli's daily record of lives saved, an unusual capability in the emergency number response environment, according to Patrick Halley, spokesperson for NENA. "There may be some U.S. jurisdictions that are tracking this kind of information, but to my knowledge, it's not universally done," he says. "One of the beauties of the data-driven system we'll see with our Next Generation 9-1-1 is that we will have access to better information, including information on the patients we respond to and the outcomes."