Why Israel's advanced emergency dispatch system outperforms 911 - opinion

Colin Powell, the late US secretary of state, once noted that bad ideas never seem to die. That observation is never truer when it comes to the seemingly immortal proposals for Israel to move to a 911 system to handle civilian emergency calls.

Currently, Israel has among the most technologically advanced dispatch systems in the world, certainly for its fire and emergency medical services.

The systems use artificial intelligence to instantly dispatch the most relevant resources – both human and vehicular – route them to the emergency scene using real-time traffic data, geolocate cell-phone callers, and use instant digital transcription capabilities to translate text messages from callers so language barriers are eliminated.

In addition, because Israel has separate emergency numbers for police, emergency medical service, and fire (people dial 100, 101, and 102, respectively) the person reporting the emergency immediately talks to the agency most relevant to the type of emergency they are calling about.

Instant medical advice

For instance, in a medical emergency, someone who dials 101 is connected within seconds to an EMT or paramedic at Magen David Adom, Israel’s official EMS organization. Because the person answering the call is a medical professional, they can instantly provide medical advice, whether it’s telling the caller to begin CPR, or instructing them how to stop drastic bleeding or administer an EpiPen.

In MDA’s case, emergency calls to 101 are answered in three seconds or less and ambulances are dispatched in mere seconds after that, enabling motorcycle-based first responders to arrive in less than five minutes and ambulances in little more than seven minutes – all measured from the time the call is answered.

SINCE 2022, the dispatch systems of the three major Israeli civilian emergency response agencies – police, EMS, and the fire service – have been linked via an interconnect, enabling any of the three organizations to automatically dispatch emergency responders from the other agencies without having to make a phone call.

What this means is that if someone calls to report a house fire, the fire service’s AI-driven dispatch system will automatically dispatch fire engines and ambulances in case someone is injured. MDA will receive notification that ambulances and EMTs have been dispatched, but they need to take no further action as the fire service’s system handled the dispatching for both agencies.

Likewise, if someone calls MDA because a person has been injured in a terror attack or other potentially criminal incident, MDA’s system will dispatch first responders, ambulances, and the police.

Israelis, for the most part, are well-versed in the phone numbers they need to call for each type of emergency. But, if they inadvertently call the wrong emergency number, the agency they are speaking to will dispatch the appropriate responders, whether it’s firefighters, EMTs, or police, regardless of having called the “wrong” agency.

One for all but not for Israel

So, what are the advantages of a 911-type system, where calls for all emergencies – police, EMS, and fire – are handled by a single call center? For Israel, the answer may be none.

In fact, when officials from the US see Magen David Adom’s dispatch centers and learn about the advanced technology incorporated into its systems, they covet the system Israel already has.

When the single 911 number for emergencies was first implemented in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it represented a vast improvement over the hodgepodge of emergency phone numbers and lack of uniformity that existed from one locality to another.

More than 50 years later, however, 911 systems in many US locales are not without their challenges. By their very design, 911 call centers necessitate that callers first talk to an operator who, in most cases, is not an EMS professional and is only trained to provide the most basic instructions in a medical emergency.

In many American markets, when a caller is done talking to the 911 operator about a medical emergency, the call is transferred to an EMS dispatcher, where the caller may have to repeat the same information they told the first person. That may mean delays in dispatching fire or EMS personnel are “baked” into the system. 

During critical medical emergencies in New York, for example, ambulances arrive in a very respectable seven minutes from the time they are dispatched. However, calls are frequently not answered or processed quickly and nearly five minutes may elapse from the time a call is answered to the time an ambulance is dispatched.

So that seven-minute ambulance response time turns into a more than 12-minute actual response. And in a critical medical emergency or fire, that five-minute difference can be the margin between a person who survives their injury or heart attack, someone who survives but who is permanently disabled from a lack of oxygen to their brain, or a person who dies from their ordeal. And that sort of delay occurs in many other American cities, too.

GIVEN THE infrastructural investment that has already gone into most 911 systems, it would be terribly disruptive for the US to move toward Israel’s trifurcated system – with separate numbers for police, EMS, and fire-related emergencies.

Likewise, given that Israel already has what is by most measures a more direct, efficient, and advanced emergency call and dispatch system, what is driving the desire to make the change to a centralized 911 system?

And, more importantly, who would benefit from the change? Well, certainly not Israelis, who would almost invariably have longer response times in emergencies as a result of having to go through a 911 operator acting as an intermediary.

In fact, only two entities would benefit: software companies that would profit from being awarded contracts to develop and implement a new 911 system, and other emergency medical response organizations that resent that MDA, which they narrowly see as a competitor, was designated by the Health Ministry to operate Israel’s official emergency medical dispatch center. This, despite the fact that MDA has developed cutting-edge systems for this very purpose.

What is also alarming when looking at this issue from thousands of miles away in the United States is that members of the Knesset are proposing the move to a 911 system without a clear understanding either of how emergency dispatching works in their own country or its many advantages.

Given the advantages of Israel’s dispatching system and the superiority of its underlying technology, many 911 call centers in the US should emulate what Israel is doing in this area. For the safety of the Israeli public, it should not be the other way around.

The writer formerly served as the Massachusetts Undersecretary for Homeland Security and Director of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, and as a police officer and emergency medical technician. He is Vice Chair of the National Board of American Friends of Magen David Adom and a member of its Executive Committee.