Event Notifications

Events can be unplanned incidents, such as Amber Alerts, mass casualty incidents, severe weather, and other emergent situations. Automated notifications are sent when these events are created. Notifications may also be sent when an event is changed or ended. For example, when resources are added to active events or when participating regions are added or removed from a multi-region event.

Events can also be planned, such as sporting events, training sessions, and exercises, or designed for information gathering, such as bed capacity and availability counts.

You can specify your preferred notification methods based on event type (template). In addition, you can indicate whether you want to be notified of ad hoc events that are created in your region.

For some types of events you can also set a limit on notifications. If the event supports this feature, the My Resources Only check box appears in the Notification Limit column.

If you select this check box for an event type, the system sends you notifications only when one or more of your resources are involved in the event.

Event notification preferences are specified by event type, and you can choose to be notified by email, text pager, or web page. To receive relevant event notifications, you must specify your event notification preferences.

Status Change Notifications

You can choose to be notified when resource statuses are changed. For example, when an emergency department (ED) posts limited availability due to overcrowding, a generator is marked not available due to maintenance, or an emergency medical services (EMS) agency changes the availability of their vehicles.

Status change notification preferences are specified by resource, and you can choose to be notified by email, text, pager, mobile app, or web page. To receive relevant status change notifications, you must specify your status change notification preferences.

System Notifications

System notifications provide more general information about your EMResource solution, such as expired statuses, the beginning or ending of incidents in an associated incident command system (ICS), or upcoming maintenance.

Most system notifications are sent by email, text, pager, mobile app, or web page. To receive important system notifications, you must specify your system-related notification preferences.

Form Notifications

EMResource also sends notifications about forms. If your response is requested on forms, you will be notified. In addition, if you have a pending form, an icon  appears in the page title bar as a reminder. Click it to view your pending forms.

Note: Your region's icons may differ from those presented in this section. Your administrator chooses the icon to associate with various types of notifications.

The delivery method for form notifications is determined by the administrator when the form is configured. You can be notified by email, text, pager, mobile app, or web page.

Incoming Patient Notifications

Your region may choose to receive incoming patient notifications from EMTrack. If this feature has been set up and you have the appropriate permissions, these notifications appear within EMResource, in the notifications window. For more information, go to the article Incoming Patient Notifications.

Voice Alerts

Your region may choose to set up event notifications by phone, a premium add-on that initiates phone calls to you and your users every time an event is started, updated, or ended, and prompts for confirmation that the message has been received.

The text-to-voice Voice Alerts concatenate the Notification Type (for example, Event Started, Event Updated, Event Ended), Event Title, and Event Information (or description) and delivers them to users that have subscribed to Voice Notifications.

Users can enter one or many phone numbers. The solution will try them in the order specified and, if there is no answer and the service is unable to leave a message, it will retry the numbers two more times.

The Phone Notifications report, with the number of notifications sent and confirmed, is accessible on the event tab, toward the top, near Event Details.