About Critical Communications
As practitioners and managers in Emergency Medical Services, Woods and co-founder vanWerkhoven were often frustrated with off-the-shelf communication systems which failed to meet the demands of the Emergency Response environment. With both an interest and ability in technology Woods and vanWerkhoven set to designing and building a system to meet the needs of their industry. They recognized that their challenges in finding suitable communication systems were far from unique. However, their approach to system design bridging the needs of the users, organization, and technology was desperately needed. And so Critical Communication Solutions Inc. was born to provide Communication Solutions to Emergency Services. Solutions that leverage the latest technology to provide the accessibility, availability, and usability that Emergency Services demands.
Availability
You don’t decide when the emergency happens. You just have to respond to it. And when you’re responding, you need your communication system to work. Critical Communication Solutions Inc. designs communication systems to meet this need. Components of any system can fail. Systems built by Critical Communication Solutions Inc. have layered technology, redundant connections, redundant power supply, and self-correcting hardware. Monitoring software provides customers with real-time status monitoring of the entire system, alarms if any component fails, and step-by-step procedures to address any component failures.
CCSI maintains and monitors our systems, watching for potential trouble spots, and addressing them proactively.
Accessibility
Your service area is large, your geography varied. Plains and mountains, Urban sprawl and remote forests, River valleys and muskeg. Each area has unique communication needs, and you serve them all. Currently available communication technologies work well in some areas, and poorly in others. Trying to stretch these technologies into areas they were never designed to cover invariably drives costs up, and performance down. One size doesn’t fit all, and often fits none.
So if one technology won’t cover everything, just add another technology and problem solved – right? It’s not so simple. Requiring end-users to learn and proficiently operate multiple varied technologies in stressful emergency situations is a recipe for disaster. Not to mention the impact on the education budget and staff morale. The solution lies in linking the technologies together on the network side, keeping it simple for the end-user. Technology vendors know their product, but often integrating their product with another, unknown technology is costly and problematic. That’s where Critical Communication Solutions Inc. comes in. We don’t sell any individual technology. We design the network to leverage the strengths of each technology, overlapping them to offer redundancy. We link the technologies together on the network side, and program the end-user technology so usage is simple.
Usability
Whether you’re a firefighter pulling a child from a burning building, a dispatcher calming a hysterical mother, a paramedic trying to save a life, or a police officer facing down an armed suspect, the last thing on your mind is the complexity of the communication technology you’re carrying. All you know, all you care, is that when you push the mike and talk, the person on the other end hears exactly what you say. Or as we say at CCSI, “I push, I talk, it works, that’s all.” For as complex as the network side of systems built by CCSI can be, we pride ourselves on the simplicity of operation for the end-user, both in the field, and in the dispatch center.
The Team
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Mark Woods
Mark Woods co-founded Critical Communication Solutions Inc. in 2008. Woods brings to Critical Communication Solutions Inc. years of experience in Emergency Medical Services, leadership, and software architecture. Prior to co-founding Critical Communication Solutions Inc. Woods held management positions with Peace Country Health E.M.S., and Grande Prairie Regional E.M.S.Woods brings a proven track record in leadership and project management. He’s well known for developing reliable, effective, custom software applications to bridge technologies, and solve Emergency Services problems. Most recently, Woods lead the design and implementation of the state-of-the-art communication network for Peace Country Health E.M.S., serving urban, rural and remote locations over 150,000 sq km.
