Southwestern Medical Center (SMC) needed to quickly pass 911 call data from their phone system to the SMC campus security personnel so that responses to 911 calls could be handled efficiently. SMC's phone system complexity prohibited Emergency Services, the local emergency response crew, from receiving the origin of the 911 call via caller ID. Without data from the caller ID, the emergency crews relied on campus security to supply the call's precise origin. However, the security personnel did not have direct access to the data either. They depended upon a telephone crew to come to the site, poll the call record data, look up the call's origin, and report the data to Emergency Services. It was a slow and unacceptable process for emergency response.
Solution
SMC discovered that Asentria' Data-Link data buffer
device could solve the critical challenge. Data-Link is capable of filtering
and alarming on the data coming into its serial ports. Asentria assisted
SMC in creating and implementing a data alarm file that looks for 911
calls coming out of the Call Data Record (CDR) port on the PBX. When the
Data-Link identifies a 911 CDR, it triggers two actions. First, it stores
the record in an accessible history file. Second, it sends a serial string
to a printer in the campus security office. This enables campus security
to immediately provide emergency services with the correct location of
the caller. Additionally, they could also send an SNMP trap containing
the CDR data, or send a pager callout for a technician to check the history
file.