Future Now
The IFTF Blog
The Future of Just-In-Time Response
One of my favorite presentations at our recent Health Horizons conference came from the Chief of the San Ramon, California Fire Department, Richard Price whose team built an incredibly simple, but incredibly powerful tool for enabling people to respond to nearby health emergencies. Specifically, the tool notifies first responders when someone nearby has gone into cardiac arrest--a condition where the difference between a two minute and a five minute response time can mean the difference between living and dying--in order to turn trained, everyday citizens into part of a broader emergency response effort.
As Tech Crunch describes the app, called Fire Department, it works like this:
[Y]ou launch it, and it prompts you to ask if you’ve been trained in CPR and would be willing to help a stranger in the event of an emergency. If you accept this, then the application will take advantage of the iPhone’s location monitoring to get a general sense of where you are (a new feature enabled with the most recent update allows this with a minimal amount of battery drain). Then, the next time a 911 dispatch center receives a call for an emergency that’s occurring near you, you’ll receive a push notification telling you that help is needed. The app will also tell if you if an automated external defibrillator (those electric paddles that can kickstart a heart) is nearby.
This Wall Street Journal highlights several relatively common examples, like someone dying of cardiac arrest in a parking lot when a defibrillator is sitting unused in a building fifty feet away, that often prevent emergency response, and and points out the transformative potential of something like Fire Department. In that spirit, I think it's worth stepping back a moment and examining what makes this such a creative idea, which could be summed up as: connecting latent capacity with actionable information.
By latent capacity, I mean people--specifically, trained people with the skill to perform CPR. In effect, the concept here is that most of us are walking around with skills--whether its the ability to perform CPR or the ability to change a tire--that could potentially be helpful to someone nearby. One estimate puts the number of trained, citizen first responders at 3 million, in comparison to the 1.2 million professionals. But most of us don't use these skills on an especially regular basis, because we don't know where to put them to use. What Fire Department does is filter through information to tell people when their skills can be urgently put to use.
But I think there's a second, more subtle shift here--and it involves a new way of building civic engagement. There are, of course, plenty of people in the world who could use help - not simply an emergency, life or death response, but could use help with everyday things like a flat tire by the side of the road, or who needs someone to provide some quick translation between languages. My sense is, that in many instances, people who have these sorts of skills would love to be able to put them to use from time to time. For example, I spent the better part of my college career and early twenties learning to speak Spanish, and now that I rarely have an opportunity to use it, it's slowly getting worse. Not only could I help someone--if I knew that someone nearby needed some quick translation--but I would love the opportunity to get to practice something I spent a lot of time learning and now don't get to use in a helpful situation.
Finally, though - and this may be specific to truly life saving skills like CPR - I think this approach has the potential to motivate people to build more civically-minded skills. The first time I underwent CPR training, our instructor--who had been teaching CPR classes for two decades--mentioned, somewhat offhandedly, that he had never used his CPR training in a real emergency. And, I have to say, I found that kind of depressing--and the thought has sort of lingered with me as I've let my initial training lapse, never quite able to motivate myself to spend a weekend relearning a skill I almost certainly will never need to use. But learning about Fire Department has made me far more interested in relearning CPR--because it points toward a future where I might be able to put that skill to use.