Stephan Noel 0:00 The company behind the Fire Safety Research Institute, then what is NERIS, and what problems we were trying to solve, and then the fire software landscape, and then some opportunities for App Proto. 0:17 Okay, I'm a senior frontend engineer at the Fire Safety Research Institute. 0:21 These are just my handles and tech that I'm interested in. 0:27 And you can usually find me in South Florida or sometimes in Costa Rica or Portugal. 0:35 So UL, you usually can, you might recognize our logos or maybe not if you squint hard enough on your smoke alarm, your circuit breaker, and if you take out your laptop charger, you'll probably find us on there as well. 0:52 And the history, so the history of UL coincides with the electrification of the US. 1:01 And basically ahead of the Chicago World's Fair, there were a lot of fires basically. 1:10 And our founder, William Henry Merrill, noticed that it was due to a lack of standards. 1:18 And above a firehouse in downtown Chicago, UL was founded. 1:26 So this is just to give you a sense of the scale of fire in the US. 1:31 There are over 30,000 fire departments and they have all different ways to do things. 1:39 And around 19,000 are completely volunteer. 1:44 And then around 3,000 are completely career, so they get salaried. 1:49 And then the rest are a combination of, yeah, basically salaried and volunteers. 1:57 And FDNY is the largest in the US, and yet the scale ranges from extremely large to extremely small. 2:07 Sometimes it's just whoever shows up for the day. 2:10 And there are 36— around 36 million calls for fire service per year, but 65% of those calls that firefighters respond to are medical in nature. 2:24 So I'll just run you through the life of a fire incident and the kind of software usually involved in that. 2:34 So step 1 is the Fire occurs, you become aware of it, then you run, then you call 911, then you— that call to 911 is actually communicating with somebody at what's called a public service answering point, a PSAP is how the acronym is. 3:02 And so this is where the CAD software comes in. 3:05 This is a computer-aided dispatch. 3:08 And then they're the ones who dispatch the fire truck. 3:12 Their goal is to arrive there within 6 minutes because when it comes to fire, every second counts. 3:21 And then the firefighters arrive on scene. 3:28 And then they fill out the details about what happened on the fire report. 3:34 So firefighters aren't really excited about filling out the report, but that data is really useful. 3:39 And we use it in order to inform our research, try to improve response times. 3:44 And yet it's not data for profit, it's for research. 3:51 So that last step, that's what's called a record management system. 3:56 RMS, and before NERIS there was NFIRS. 4:01 So what would happen is the, the FHIR software that they would use would basically take whatever they entered in plain text and they would submit it to an FTP server. 4:14 And then 1 to 2 years later, around the time by which it's no longer useful at all, then they can finally get that data out. 4:24 And the major problem was that the data standard hadn't updated since 2014. 4:29 So all of these different software providers would have— they would be stuffing data into this one field where they can put in whatever they wanted. 4:40 And basically there was no data portability because of that. 4:49 So then NERIS comes in and we make the schema more flexible to try to prevent that kind of, um, vendor lock-in. 5:00 In addition, we also provide this, uh, a free RMS, um, in order for them to enter their data. 5:08 And we also provide, um, the, like, essential analytics for them out. 5:14 And all of this is provided for free. 5:17 And in— and it's also— we provide a REST API, not an FTB server. 5:23 Um, we will also be providing NERIS public, which will also provide aggregate data. 5:32 Um, and that will be available— you won't need authentication in order to get to that. 5:42 So did we solve everything? 5:43 Was all we needed to reverse time back to the open API days and just have a separate entity in charge of that API? 5:54 Well, the FHIR service software needs go beyond just incident data. 6:01 It includes pre-planning for how you would plan your response to a FHIR access point. 6:08 Just structure, inspections for fire code violations, permit management, personnel management to manage the training of firefighters, staffing and scheduling, 'cause firefighters usually, they work 48 hours in a row and trade shifts all the time, and you'd have to manage your fire trucks and fire hoses and medication as well. 6:38 So there's a lot of software that firefighters need, but the thing is they want only one invoice, one bill at the end, because request for proposal is difficult, especially in the larger fire departments. 6:57 So what happened is they wanted to— they had one FIRE software that was really good at one thing, and then these companies, in order to provide what firefighters wanted, became mediocre in a lot of things. 7:14 They, in order to implement these other features, they had to, well, try to implement it themselves, but usually would aggressively acquire in order to do so, to become a kind of everything app for FIRE. 7:27 And those departments who only wanted some of the features would now have to pay for all of them. 7:34 And what fire departments really wanted was just one bill and software that did a lot of things. 7:41 And this had led to one tool to rule them all. 7:46 And that has led to just a few companies ruling them all. 7:51 And so now about 60% of the market share is owned by 4 companies. 7:56 And it's often driven by medical reporting needs, as you saw that 65% of the calls are medical in nature. 8:05 So this is kind of related to what Rudy mentioned before, but people don't want more and more apps, but also the billing experience is important here as well. 8:21 And when it comes to fire trucks, the situation is even more dire, and the price hikes that resulted is is even worse. 8:34 And fire isn't just a US problem, it's global, and we want to connect to and work with international communities. 8:42 And the EU has actually recently started FireSTAT, and Canada has also expressed interest in something similar of a reporting at a national level. 8:55 And yet, to understand the fire problem, we will need global standards. 9:01 And what if we can go beyond incidents and also include all the data from all the different fire software that firefighters use? 9:11 I think App Proto has a lot of potential here. 9:14 And if you have ideas on how to push safety science, fire science, and safety science forward, we are open to collaboration. 9:25 So if you would like to get started on, on, in FHIR software, one, one way would be to integrate with NERIS. 9:34 This top link here is the link that will show you all the steps. 9:37 You create some Jira tickets and we'll set you up with a dedicated department. 9:42 And this below, the link below is the link to our API docs. 9:49 And just some final thoughts. 9:51 The transition to NERIS just happened January of this year, and the moat is lower than ever. 9:59 We're seeing two-person startups making real headway, and word of mouth spreads fast in the fire service. 10:07 And I would love to see @proto enter this space as well. 10:11 You don't need fire knowledge to build on NERIS. 10:17 Second, just an open question again. 10:21 Interop gives us a lot more user choice, but can we have a better billing experience as well? 10:29 And then finally, the FHIR space, who would have thought it would be dominated by for VC-funded companies as well. 10:43 And you've heard it before, products drive protocols, and I'd love to see us drive our product forward with FHIR software. 10:53 Thank you. Speaker B 10:58 That was great. 10:59 So you actually pitched civic tech, global standards, and then you snuck in an app for the wallet in the side of things as well. Stephan Noel 11:12 Did I do that? Speaker B 11:13 Yeah, you did. 11:13 That was amazing. 11:14 Yeah, thank you very much.