I have written about Decisions for Heroes (D4H) before. Visionary founder Robin Blandford guest blogged for me earlier this year, and then I highlighted his trip to the National Search and Rescue Conference in mid-May. To be clear, I am not generally in the business of product promotion, but what D4H portends for search and rescue, emergency response, and any organization or team in a similar business... well, it's too impressive to be ignored.So what is D4H? Mr. Blandford explains himself...
"Decisions For Heroes is a web application that saves lives, it does this by helping rescue teams record and analyze their rescue operations and training. We perform automatic analysis of your incidents to look for patterns and trends in your response times, injuries encountered, casualty demographics, with hotspot cluster mapping to identify areas at higher risk. Track and record qualifications and exercises and receive alerts when these qualifications are set to expire. Keep a records of skills used by members on incidents and monitor training history."Frankly, I think Mr. Blandford understates his own product's significance (by the way, this is a passion he knows from his own experience serving in the Irish Coast Guard).
Now I fully understand that large, technologically sophisticated organizations possess already well-established systems for operations, personnel, training, and reporting management. This will be D4H's great market challenge. To those organizations, though, I say this: while D4H may not be on your shopping list, its technical and design features are not to be cast aside -- indeed, they could very well show you what you are missing.
Remember, though, that I write from the perspective of a Coast Guard Auxiliarist. We have a dedicated and hard work technology shop, but D4H is an excellent candidate to step up and meet the needs of many Flotillas and Divisions. I also see the potential for great use of the program in fire departments, emergency medical and rescue squads, and citizen response and emergency organizations everywhere.
Software should not be less for its features (You can read all about those on the Decisions for Heroes website) and more for what those features actually mean to an operational team, as learned through my personal experience having pressed it into use over the last several months in USCG Auxiliary Flotilla Arlington | Northern Virginia.
Operational Focus
Our team has focused more on operations and training through exercises and in the classroom since we started using D4H. The system forces us to really consider where we are spending our time and resources because it places operations -- not administration -- at the forefront. We know what is upcoming, what is behind us, where we are spending our time geographically, and (to a very great degree) what we are training to do and whether or not those skills are being used in actual operations.
Team Coordination
Hitherto, planning ahead has required a lot of manual labor on the part of the person in charge. Planning an exercise or training, coordinating among participants, tracking attendance, and after action reporting are well ingrained facts of life that D4H streamlines. The planner can now schedule an event, providing details such as time, location, materials, reporting instructions, or uniform of the day. Skills and topics can be assigned to the event (so that you can track what you are training on against what you are doing during real missions), and individual personnel or entire groups can be assigned (or invited in the case of optional events). Assignments then automatically appear on an individuals calendar, and a weekly briefing containing those assignments is automatically emailed to all hands to start the week. You can assign resources (boats, vehicles, gear, etc) to each event so as to track resource utilization, track maintenance tasks against those resources, and assign qualifications and "on call" status to individual personnel (allowing you to know instantly when, for example, you have less than two coxswains, four emergency medical personnel, or whatever combination you choose available). Neat, right?
After Action Reporting and Intelligence
Individual personnel assigned to each mission can provide after action information, and the official record contains information as detailed as weather conditions, wind direction, casualties, persons assisted, lives saved, and lessons learned. Attendance reports are necessary, but quaint when you consider that D4H automatically generates reports on time to scene, miles traveled, attendance over time, qualifications requiring refresher training, geographic distribution, and a number more. There is enough here to provide the team insight on future operations, and the most information-starved administrative type with reams of data to chew through.
There is more, but these are the three "big wins" that we have uncovered since we began using D4H. This system -- and the planning and operational concepts that it promotes -- is a winner and a blessing to teams and units the world over.