Dr. Dan Schlager, M.D., president of Zoltar Satellite Alarm Systems, filed an ex parte brief with the Federal Communications Commission urging it to apply Phase II E911 rules on locating emergency callers to new wireless phones only.
Schlager said the wireless industry should follow the lead of the automotive industry when deciding how to implement the mandate.
“They didn’t retrofit the 1957 Chevy with airbags,” he said. “They only applied it to new cars.”
If the FCC requires that only new phones be equipped, Zoltar’s system would be allowed to compete more fairly in the E911 marketplace, said Schlager.
The company, which owns patents to combine global positioning system technology, wireless devices and emergency buttons or automatic sensors, advocates a handset-based solution to the Phase II requirements rather than a network-based approach. One of the reasons, said Schlager, is that about 70 percent of trauma-related deaths occur in rural areas where network-based location systems are less likely to provide a highly accurate location of the person in distress.
“Location is a lot easier to do in the city than in rural areas, and I don’t want those areas to be neglected,” said Schlager. “Coverage needs to be the strongest in those areas, especially with so many rural hospitals closing.”
While riding in emergency helicopters shortly after finishing his residency, Schlager became aware of problems associated with locating accident and trauma victims. Flying over Arizona deserts, rescue teams would know there was an accident but not where it was.
“We were getting there too late,” said Schlager, who has taken a leave of absence from practicing medicine in order to promote the system he and a partner have devised. “I think every emergency physician has signature cases where they know if they could have gotten the patient a little bit earlier, it would have made a difference.”
The difference is often as dramatic as life or death. Advances in medicine have brought about drugs that can dissolve blood clots and save the lives of heart attack and stroke victims, but they need to be administered within a couple of hours of the initial trauma, said Schlager.
In many other cases, getting a patient earlier means being able to administer medications and techniques that can mean the difference between brain death and a normal life, said Schlager. Doctors call that critical time the “golden hour.”
Schlager’s research found that the two weak links in emergency medicine were calls coming in too late and the ability to locate the caller.
Although there was nothing anyone could do to make calls come in faster, Schlager said the emergence of GPS as a military application during the Persian Gulf war and the proliferation of wireless technology made him think that the two technologies could work together to help emergency personnel find trauma victims more quickly.
To Schlager, incorporating GPS into wireless phones for emergency use made sense. He said ambulances already use GPS technology and it would only cause confusion to bring in a different technology.
The problem with installing the location device only in new handsets as Schlager has proposed, say opponents, is that none of the more than 50 million current users will have phones equipped to provide location information to dispatchers, and the price to retrofit all those phones would be exorbitant. The common denominator is the network infrastructure, they say, and that is where E911 solutions should be implemented.
“Network solutions enable systems to locate all terminals. However, they impose the burden of capital costs on the cellular carriers,” said industry analyst Herschel Shosteck in a letter to Schlager. “Terminal solutions hold the advantage of minimizing capital costs for carriers. However, they carry the disadvantage of not serving the embedded base of terminals.”
Schlager said no matter how it comes about, he is most interested in making sure competition brings about a viable location technology for E911.
“It wasn’t my intent to lead the charge,” he said. “Whatever is the best technology should win, and if GPS is the best solution, then that’s what I want.
“My belief is that GPS is more accurate,” he continued. “If I’m wrong-if another technology is better-then that’s what I want.”
