According to NENA, an estimated 240 million calls are made to 9–1–1 in the U.S. each year. These calls are handled by approximately 6000 public safety answering points (PSAP) located across the nation. Emergency respondents receive calls for a variety of reasons, for medical emergencies, to report a crime or accident they are witnessing or are victims of, when a fire breaks out or sometimes by accident.

Often, the callers are able to describe the nature of their emergencies and their location. Other times, the call gets dropped before they can do either. PSAPs are tasked with dispatching the right resource to the right location as soon as they can. Every minute counts as delays can cause loss of life and property that could have otherwise been prevented.

Tech teams in PSAPs can use modern incident response systems that escalate urgent issues that come from the 24/7 hotline. When an incident occurs, it should be escalated when someone submits an urgent ticket.

For example, lets say someone is suffering from a heart attack and is all alone in their house. They have a very short time to get help before they are physically unable to do so. If, on the day, a technical glitch occurred on one of the systems that prevented a hotline respondent from viewing the list of hospitals nearby and dispatching an ambulance within minutes, a life could be lost.

However, if we take that same scenario, and respondent was able to reach out to the tech team immediately through Zenduty rather than scrolling through a long protocol document to find the number of the appropriate tech team member, the story would end very differently. With Zenduty, a respondent could quickly reach the right person, a backup system would be deployed, and the respondent would be able to connect the caller with the services they needed — and get them the medical help they need in time.

When someone’s safety and trust is on the line, every second matters. It takes courage and strength for a victim or a bystander to reach out for help. Timeliness and effectiveness are everything in these circumstances, and those are the elements essential to building a platform here that people can rely on.


Zenduty is a revolutionary incident management platform that allows incidents to be reported, escalated and resolved faster. Sign up for free here.