As executive director of the Guilford Metro 911 emergency communications center, which handled more than 728,000 calls last year, she is one of the most important public safety leaders in one of North Carolina’s largest counties.
Jones is overseeing the deployment of a new platform from Hexagon, an effort meant to increase call handling and dispatcher productivity; rush real-time information to police, fire and medical personnel in the field; and offer speech-to-text capabilities and other features.
It’s all part of the general, nationwide push to improve 911 services to keep up with new technologies and changing preferences on how people communicate.
“Lots of 911 centers will be watching this closely,” Jones told Government Technology right before she took over as the newest president of the National Emergency Number Association.
The deployment in Guilford County — which includes the city of Greensboro, and has more than 541,000 residents — involves a computer-aided dispatch product called HxGN OnCall Dispatch.
It allows various first responders to essentially come together on one interface, which in turn enriches information sharing and the deployment of emergency resources, according to the company. The software employs assistive artificial intelligence to “analyze incoming calls and other real-time data to identify trends and anomalies that might be missed during a hectic, multi-agency response to an emergency.”
Jones expects the new technology to reduce response times and increase multi-agency collaborations.
Her operation handles calls for at least two police agencies, two different EMS and rescue organizations and 22 county fire districts. The communications center can boast of answering 99.8 percent of calls within 10 seconds, making it one of the state leaders in that metric, according to Hexagon.
As Jones sees it, the new emergency communications software has a “modern interface” that will make the taxing, stressful job of 911 operator easier. The tool, being deployed over the next year to 18 months, provides an upgrade from the current system, which dates back to 1997.
The new tech also should prove relatively seamless when it comes to adding new tools in the future, especially as AI takes on more public safety and emergency call-handling tasks, she said.
