Improve Response to Critical and Emergency Situations

Rapid, effective communication is crucial in any situation where every second counts. Whether it's a fire, a medical emergency or some other life-threatening situation, organizations must be able to mobilize and coordinate internal resources to first responders appropriately and effectively.

What happens after someone calls the emergency services greatly depends on both the agency handling the call and the telephony infrastructure supporting the call. A modern, IP-based communications system enables organizations to launch an automated, coordinated response by also notifying designated personnel who can help shape the most effective response to any unfolding scenario.

Using public phone networks' support for summoning emergency assistance as its foundation, ShoreTel Emergency Notification Application adds company-specific alerts that help guide first responders to specific buildings, floors and even rooms where an emergency is occurring. This additional information improves emergency responses to any type of manmade or natural disaster by helping put the right people in place at the right time.

Formerly known as the E911 Notification Application, ShoreTel's Emergency Notification Application can now be configured to support any country-specific emergency code—such as France's 112 and Australia's 000—so more information about an event can be communicated to personnel charged with handling emergency situations.

"While most emergency codes will guide a dispatched ambulance to a particular street address, the Emergency Notification Application can alert onsite security personnel that, for example, an ambulance has been called," said Maura Higgins, director of professional services at ShoreTel. "This alert helps prepare them to meet the arriving emergency medical technicians and offers potentially critical minutes in which to activate a company-led response to the incident at hand—an employee's heart attack, a fire alarm or other types of incidents."

The targeted information that can be rapidly disseminated across phone and data networks has made the software a dependable favorite of K-12 schools, colleges and universities, said Higgins. "The school campus is a perfect example of how it's not only security staff who need to be aware of a potentially dangerous situation," she said. "Key administrative staff and teachers may need to be kept apprised of a certain incident to help ensure that everyone follows the correct lock-down procedures."

In addition, the Emergency Notification Application allows organizations to customize the system to whatever level of alert is appropriate, and all alerts and responses—or lack of responses from designated persons—are logged by the product's reporting feature to assist with post-incident evaluation.

Code Blue Alerts

New to the Emergency Notification Application is a second, less critical level of alerting called Code Blue.

"The new Code Blue alert allows companies to agree on non-emergency scenarios that are nevertheless important events that still call for a fixed series of responses from one or more levels within the organization," Higgins said. "This might be something like a small chemical spill at a manufacturing plant or the unexpected opening of emergency doors in the lobby. While the incident may not rise to the level of a life-threatening emergency, an organization's policy may stipulate that certain personnel around the organization are made aware of what's happened, and that the correct series of actions is taken in response.

For Code Blue events, ShoreTel's Emergency Notification Application delivers an audible blue screen "pop" to designated desktops or a page to designated phones.

"ShoreTel has designed the Code Blue feature after listening to the needs of our customers," Higgins added. "Several customers in the healthcare sector asked our professional services team for a way to summon certain groups of personnel in response to events of varying severity

Multinational corporations have a range of preferences as to who receives which Emergency and Code Blue alerts, which is why ShoreTel now also supports site-specific alerting. Useful in inter-country deployments—for example, a director of operations in New York may wish to be alerted to news that someone in the London office called 999—as well as intra-organization ones. Case in point: the director of resident care at an assisted-living facility may wish to be alerted that a resident dialed 911, but the director of finance may not. "This feature is very important for our larger customers," Higgins said.

For more information about the ShoreTel Emergency Notification application and other applications that integrate seamlessly with the ShoreTel UC system, visit our Web site or contact ShoreTel's professional services group.