The Next Generation Safety Consortium (NGSC) brings together national organizations involved in emergency response, academic institutions, government leaders, and technology partners in a broad, multi-dimensional effort to deploy next generation emergency Information and Communications Technology (ICT). The Consortium promotes broadband access for all 9-1-1 and emergency response agencies, robust and secure broadband backbone networks connecting them, and the multiple services and applications enabled by such broadband access.
Effective emergency response and emergency healthcare delivery in the United States are products of the combined efforts of the public, emergency response organizations, non-governmental and academic institutions, the private sector, consumer and social service agencies and all levels of government (local, state, tribal and federal).
Before, during and after an emergency of any magnitude, citizens depend on the coordinated efforts of all of these entities. Yet, each of these sectors has their own unique responsibilities, governance structures, information sharing policies and communications technologies. And each sector has thousands of independent entities, making intra and inter-sector information sharing difficult.
Organizational structures are in place today to manage the tactical mobile interoperability issues of first responders, primarily focused on voice communications. However, there is no national organizational effort to address the shared ICT needs of each of these sectors to enable organization-to-organization information sharing. Thus, while significant effort has been devoted to the ICT needs of the endpoints in the chain of response (9-1-1, police, fire, EMS agencies, hospitals, etc.), there is currently a lack of focus in the middle, on the organizational and technological meeting points of all of these sectors and their member organizations – governance structure, information sharing policies, and shared technologies and services that enable the interconnection of all of these organizations.
Advancements in modern networks, services and applications offer a significant opportunity for the multitude of organizations involved in emergency response to “meet in the middle” through the use of standards and shared modern ICT. As communications technology advances, public and private organizations responsible for the delivery of emergency response in America must come together to understand and take advantage of this opportunity. A major national effort is needed to organize the shared use of technologies and services, increase organizational information sharing, and develop the shared governance structure to manage “the middle”.
Therefore, a number of the nation’s leading emergency response, medical, consumer, technology and academic organizations have come together to form the Next Generation Safety Consortium, representing the diversity of all of these sectors and designed to meet the objectives described on this site.
