Inform ELITE Incident Intelligence for Emergency Communications Centers

The NICE Inform Elite edition goes far beyond traditional emergency communications recording solutions to deliver incident intelligence that empowers Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) to improve their operational performance, provide better quality service and make smarter decisions.

“With its release of NICE Inform Elite, NICE truly stands out as a public safety trend-setter and pioneer,” said Dick Bucci, principal analyst, Pelorus Associates. “NICE has found a way to bring together data from the siloed systems that PSAPs use every day, to enable decision makers to visualize it in new ways, operationalize it, and extract hidden insights to improve operations.”

“All emergency communication centers have performance targets they strive to meet,” said Chris Wooten, executive vice president, NICE. “They need to stay on top of these targets to ensure they’re performing at the highest levels and keeping the public safe. With NICE Inform Elite, PSAPs now have access to the incident intelligence they need to make smarter, faster decisions, along with workflow automation tools to optimize quality and operational performance.”

NICE Inform Elite adds four new core capabilities on top of Inform’s already robust applications. These include: CAD Incident Analytics to enhance incident reconstruction and automate quality assurance workflow; Incident Intelligence dashboards for real-time tracking of performance targets and trends; GIS mapping for improved incident visualization and analysis; and a future-ready multimedia recording platform.

Advanced CAD Incident Analytics Enhances Incident Reconstruction and Automates QA

A critical function of emergency communications centers involves fulfilling audio reproduction requests for district attorneys, investigators and other requesters. PSAPs typically handle thousands of such requests annually. Inform Elite’s CAD Incident Analytics streamlines this process by eliminating unnecessary steps and improving search precision. Users can now bypass the CAD system and type the CAD incident ID/report number directly into Inform Elite. All multimedia recordings related to the incident (emergency calls, radio, screens and SMS texts) are instantly retrieved and merged onto one timeline, along with CAD event data showing when the initial call was answered, when units were dispatched, and when they arrived on scene. These audio reproductions can be saved and securely shared.

“I am very excited about NICE Inform Elite. It takes the guesswork out of trying to match CAD records to audio recordings – it does it for me automatically,” said Karin Marquez, Communication Supervisor for the Westminster (CO) Police Department. “Inform Elite has already cut my audio request fulfilment time in half. It also provides a much clearer picture of how incidents were handled, in terms of what actions were taken, by whom, and when – which is essential for investigations, compliance and quality assurance.”

Inform Elite’s CAD Incident Analytics also helps PSAPs comply with the APCO/NENA Quality Assurance and Quality Improvement (QA/QI) standard, which recommends that PSAPs review all calls involving high acuity and catastrophic events. NICE Inform Elite automates this process by applying CAD incident type classifications, severity and other parameters to automatically select and schedule calls for QA review.

Incident​ Intelligence ​Dashboards Track Key ​Performance Measurements​

PSAPs have performance measurement programs with specific goals for emergency call answer times, response times, etc. Proactively monitoring performance vis a vis these targets ensures that agencies are consistently performing at the highest levels. NICE Inform Elite helps PSAPs stay on top of performance targets and out of the media spotlight. It uniquely consolidates data from CAD, telephony, radio, and the Inform Evaluator QA system to provide near real-time snapshots of performance across multiple dimensions – call volumes, call durations, speed of answer, hold times, dispatches, dispatch times, on-scene response times, quality assurance scores, and more – with the ability to drill down to listen to associated audio recordings.

All information is presented on web-based dashboards in easily digestible charts, graphs and maps, viewable on smartphones, tablets, desktops and wallboards. Managers can isolate performance metrics for different shifts, telecommunicators, CAD incident types, and other criteria, to determine where staffing, training and operational improvements can be made.

NICE Inform Elite also indexes CAD comments to create word clouds which can be visualized through the dashboard. The more frequently a word is used, the larger and closer to the center of the cloud it will appear. Managers can click on words of interest to drill down to associated call recordings and data.

GIS Mapping for Improved Incident Visualization and Early Situational Awareness

NICE Inform Elite’s Incident Intelligence dashboards, Quality Assurance and reconstruction modules are now enhanced with GIS mapping which enables managers to view the geolocation of CAD incidents, emergency calls, radio communications and captured SMS texts on interactive GIS maps. This provides a more in-depth visual context of events, with the ability to zoom in to specific locations, and drill down to multimedia recordings for investigations or QA reviews. Because this information is updated in near real-time, it can also provide early situational awareness of potential large-scale events. GIS heat maps can also be used for retrospective analysis, for example to visualize where certain types of crimes occur most often.

All-in-one Future-ready Multimedia Recording Platform

Finally, NICE Inform Elite also gives PSAPs an all-in-one, NENA i3-compliant, cloud-ready solution capable of supporting complete multimedia recording needs, including: telephony, P25 radio, screen recording, SMS text, Next Generation 911/112/999/000 audio and text, NG911 Enhanced Data EIDD, FirstNet and ESN LTE broadband audio, and more.