One of the questions we often receive about our ERS platform is the inclusion of voice to text functionality. This request comes up frequently because the demand for this functionality is high. Imagine a situation where you send one team out to assess structural damage, another to work up the bed census (your bed board was incapacitated in the incident) and a third group to report back on the volunteer head count. The best case scenario here is you have enough radios for each of these groups. If not, you will need to rely on cell phones, with each group calling in to the Hospital Command Center with their status reports.

While both of these solutions are definitely viable, they both lack something - the ability to transcribe these verbal reports into text. So, ERS is the solution to this dilemma? Not really. ERS is an Emergency Management platform for hospitals. As such, its focus is storing information from multiple data sources in one unified data base to enhance analysis and sharing. In short, ERS does not have any voice to text functionality. What is does have, is the ability to integrate with external voice to text solutions. And there is one such solution that recently launched in public beta - Jott.

Jott is a free service that provides 'real time' transcription (single quotes because there is about a 5 minute delay). You call a central number, indicate who you would like to send a message to ("who'd you like to Jott") and then leave a voice mail. The message recipient receives an email and a text message with a transcription of your voice mail. There is also a link to the actual voice mail in case it needs to be reviewed for clarity. Let's take a look at setting up a jott account and some of the features that are useful for Emergency Management.

Step 1 - set up a Jott account
To sign up for a Jott account, you need a phone number (mobile) and an email address. These are the numbers Jott uses to communicate with you. You then need to validate both your email and phone number. Once you have your account set up, it is time to start looking into Jott's features.

Step 2 - send yourself a message
There are 2 main sections to your Jott account - the JottBox (to track messages sent and received) and your contact list. Contacts can be added manually, or imported directly from your existing accounts (outlook, AOL, hotmail, gmail, yahoo, plaxo and other). For now we are going to concentrate on the JottBox side of things by sending a reminder to ourselves. Call Jott at 877-568-8486 and when asked 'who'd you like to Jott', say, 'me'. Leave a message at the tone then go back to your JottBox. It takes about 5 min for transcription but soon you will see the contents of your voice mail listed as a jot from 'Me'. Your phone and email account will also start notifying you as the messages arrive.

Step 3 - send a message to a group
In addition to building contacts, you can also make groups. The group itself has a name (the one you will use when you call Jott so make it simple to say) and contacts from your list are added as members. Now when you send a message to the group, all of its members receive notification via email and text.

Step 4 - publishing your Jotts
So far so good. We are sending messages to ourselves, to others and to groups. But how do we store these communications? How can we review messages from various team members? Jott also has a great feature that allows us to publish directly to a blog. Blog publishing is enabled by adding a contact called blog with the email address that has publish permission on an existing blog (see the Jott FAQ for common blog configuration steps). Now you can call Jott and select 'blog' as the recipient to publish text directly to a common web page. You can also include the blog contact in your group to capture communications from group members.

Step 5 - bringing it all together
Jott can be a very handy tool to fill in some of your communication gaps by allowing field personnel to publish content, as text with links to the original voice messages, in real-time from the field with only a cell phone. ERS can enhance this functionality by adding to the text field messages. Imagine combining real time field reports with links to policy and procedure documents, response plans, HICS forms, resource management, skills inventories and dynamic org charts. Now you can incorporate situation reports, live from the field, into the rest of your response information to get an even more complete operational view of the incident at hand.