By Jacquelyn Nelson
Hesston Record – September 12, 2013
Submitted by Newz Group Clipping Service – October 3, 2013
Stephen Owens, a Hesston Fire Department Captain, is one of the creative minds behind Page-Out, a revolutionary new app that allows volunteer fire departments to know, at all times, how many volunteers are available to respond to an emergency.
According to Owens, volunteers using the app can sign in and out of availability with the push of a button. Owens said speed and simplicity were the keys to Page-Out.
“It’s an on call availability and it’s as simple to use as you can imagine. It’s pushing the app and the page in and page out button. You’ve accomplished the entire thing. We wanted this to update everyone within that network faster than a text, and it does. It updates everyone on that network faster than a text message,” said Owens.
Page-Out has been in the testing phase for several months and celebrated an official launch party on Friday, September 9.
Hesston Emergency Services Director Russ Buller said Page-Out has been in the testing phase with the Hesston Fire Department and he has come to appreciate the easy use of the app and the instantly updated information on volunteer availability.
“As a director of Fire/EMS services with upwards of 40 personnel, it is critical that I know what my staffing levels are at any time day or night. This “system” places that information at my disposal whenever I need it. I feel that critical information such as what it provides is a universal need that will improve all departments that use it,” said Buller.
As a fire captain, Owens said having immediate knowledge of staffing levels can save lives when even seconds are critical.
“Let’s say Hesston gets a call for a structure fire at 123 N. Main with a possible entrapment. I pick up my radio and I look at my on call availability. How many people do I have available? If I saw that I have only four paged in, then I’m back on the radio that I need mutual aid and need it stat.
“If we didn’t have the app then I respond to the station, go to the scene, and wait to see who shows up to the call. If I only have a few people show, that’s five to 10 minutes before we’re making that mutual aid call when we could have made it immediately.
“In the end, that five or 10 minutes can save someone’s life. When we look at how many volunteer departments there are—and there are 37,000 of them—that’s a lot of departments that benefit from that immediate knowledge,” said Owens.
While Page-Out was Owens’ brainchild, he relied on developer and programmer Carlos Fernandez of Wichita.
Fernandez said the simplicity of the app belies the great deal of work that went into creating it.
“If it’s super simple, then it’s something that took a lot of man-hours to make it work that easily. Honestly, the easier it is, the more work it takes,” he said.
As a developer, Fernandez had a whole different set of priorities with the Page-Out project.
“One of the biggest things was being able to have the network as robust as possible. One of the biggest things I want 10 million users to access this thing. It’s not going to be easy. We had several different types of FTP servers. You work in client FTP and ‘GUI’ (graphical user interface),” he said.
One of the major challenges, Fernandez said, was keeping up with ever-changing technology and ensuring the behind-the-scenes elements were fully functional, even at maximum capacity.
“With this type of development and programming, we had to figure out what type of servers were going to make 10 million users able to run this. Lets say fire department A through X are using this and, who knows, they might do it at the same time. We had to make sure there were no glitches.
“We went through the beta stage working out glitches because both clients were virtual servers. We pushed them to the limit. Once we got them to break, where do we go from there? What about Facebook and Twitter? What are they using for server space? We host everything on Amazon web service. They are the most robust on the planet. That was one of the biggest problems, which we solved about six months ago,” he said.
Owens said he hopes to make Page-Out accessible and affordable for volunteer emergency departments across the nation, and internationally.
“It’s a monthly subscription that starts at $30 a month for 40 users, $49 a month for 40-70 users and $70 a month for 70-plus. When you take that compared to what departments pay for air-touch pagers that are $15 a month for a pager and for captains, that’s $40 to $60 a month for pagers that aren’t even interactive. We’ve built it to make it affordable and simple to get people to use it. There’s no set-up fee, no contracts. It is our desire for people to see this and how it will fit in their department’s operating procedures and use it,” he said.
Buller said the system has been successfully adopted in Hesston and has kept him and his officers fully informed on staffing status.
“I see that this app will do nothing but improve our response capabilities and the services we provide our community. It is exceptional that it was conceptualized and developed by someone from within our own department.”
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