The Mid-America Regional Council is working on solutions to lower wait times for people in the metro area who call 911 for emergency help.
When someone calls 911, the call is almost always routed to one of two places.
A caller is sent to a police department or a fire department, but there is an unfortunate third option.
With higher than average wait times, a person needing help could end up stuck on hold.
"That's where we have the problem is when the call volume goes very high with only a certain number of staff there to answer them, that wait time gets longer," said Steve Hoskins, the Kansas City Police Department's Interoperability Systems Manager.
The Kansas City Police Department's large, regional system covers 11 counties and does work, but like department's nationwide, there's a shortage of dispatchers and call takers.
One solution to the hold time problem is adding what's called an auto-attendant.
Callers would get a quicker answer, then would be prompted to press 1 for an emergency requiring a police response, press 2 for a non-emergency incident and 3 for the fire department and EMS.
That would remove the need for a call taker to spend valuable time pressing the switch button manually while other callers wait on hold.
But using an auto-attendant to bridge the gap between the two separate systems running police and fire calls is harder than it appears.
Hassan Al-Rubaie is the 911 Technical Services Manager for the system.
"We see the challenge, but were up to the challenge," he said. “We’ve done things differently here in the MARC region throughout the inception of the 911 program.”
Hoskins said the region has been a model for the country on how to do 911 systems.
"Because we have a very large regional 911 system, we work well together, we save our citizens a lot of tax dollars because we don't each have to have our own server at every 911 center," Hoskins said.
With it's much larger reach and unique system architecture, there is no other solution ready to automatically link the two police and fire/EMS host systems.
Motorola is currently developing a solution for the problem, but there's no estimate on how much it would cost or how long it would take to implement.
"Motorola feels that they can do it. But they have not actually been able to do that or get it to work yet, they don't have a cost, they still have to do testing," said Major Scott Boden of the Johnson County Sheriff's Department.
Until then, plans and callers will remain on hold.
