Homeland Security Watch

One day last year, Richard Price and a few co-workers from his agency’s information technology (IT) group were eating lunch at a deli. He heard a siren and briefly wondered where the emergency was.

The siren got louder and closer. In a few minutes, a fire engine pulled up and parked in front of the deli. That’s when Price — who is the fire chief for California’s San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District — learned the San Ramon engine was responding to a cardiac arrest call next door to the deli.

Price was on duty, in uniform, with a defibrillator in his car. One of the people he was eating lunch with was a paramedic. The emergency was a few feet away, but no one knew until the engine showed up. (Price carries a pager, but he’s typically not notified of medical emergencies.)

Cardiac arrest means the heart stops beating. Once that happens to you, you have about 10 minutes to live. After that, there is very little chance you’ll survive. Each year, over 300,000 people in the United States die from sudden cardiac arrest. Many of those people die needlessly. But even with all the advances in medicine, national survival rates are still less than 8%.

CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) buys time to allow paramedics to arrive and provide advanced care. Survival rates can exceed 80% when CPR is performed and an automated external defibrillator (AED — a small machine that shocks the heart back into normal rhythm) is used in the first few minutes after a cardiac arrest.

Price was very bothered he had no idea there was someone just a few steps away from him who needed help. He promised this would not happen to him again, or to anyone else in his community. He spent the rest of that afternoon with his IT staff brainstorming and drawing diagrams on deli napkins

The result of that incident is an iPhone application — called Fire Department — that gives regular citizens the chance to provide life-saving assistance to victims of Sudden Cardiac Arrest. The application helps dispatch CPR trained citizens to cardiac emergencies occurring nearby.

Here’s how it works: Once you download the free iTunes app (available here),  you can be notified if you are near someone having a cardiac emergency.  Notifications are made — the same time paramedics are dispatched — to people who are CPR trained and who  indicated they are willing to assist during a sudden cardiac arrest emergency.

The notifications will only be made if the victim is in a public place and only to potential rescuers who are in the immediate vicinity of the emergency. The application also directs the citizen rescuers to the exact location of the closest public access AED.

Currently the application only works within the San Ramon Valley fire district, in California. But Chief Price eagerly wants to share the application “with other communities around the globe.”  The current version works on the iPhone. Price’s agency is developing versions for other smart phones.

You can see a short video explaining the app at the end of this post. You can also go to http://firedepartment.mobi for more information.

The first time I heard about the app, the public safety group I was with — while strongly supportive of the idea — had several questions about potential downsides and liabilities of the application. Price convinced the audience that his agency was entering this new dimension of citizen engagement with its organizational eyes open. They have considered the potential benefits against liabilities and are willing to accept the risks if it means saving more lives.

What is the connection between the Fire Department app and homeland security?

If homeland security has to do with “all hazards,” then surely there must be room within the enterprise for an idea that can help reduce some of the 300,000 deaths caused each year by sudden cardiac arrest.

As importantly, Fire Department is one more example of the importance of a surging technology that can sling angry birds into enclaves of thieving pigs, or overthrow a dictator, or save the life of a heart attack victim who did not have to die.

I wonder what else the technology can do?

Here’s the video that shows what the San Ramon Fire Department did with it.