Orland Fire Protection District Rolls Out New Lifesaving Technology

ORLAND PARK, IL — The Orland Fire Protection District on Tuesday announced the adoption of PulsePoint within the organization to further the Fire District’s commitment to creating a healthy and civically engaged community. The announcement took place at the Fire District’s monthly Board of Trustees meeting where Lt Joshua Girdick detailed the benefits of PulsePoint, a free-to-download mobile app, which 1) alerts CPR-trained citizens of cardiac events in their vicinity so they may administer aid, 2) helps build a comprehensive Automated External Defibrillator (AED) registry and 3) informs the community of emergency activity in real time.

PulsePoint Respond empowers everyday citizens to provide life‐saving assistance to victims of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). PulsePoint Respond app subscribers who have indicated they are trained in cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and willing to assist in case of an emergency can be notified if someone nearby is having a SCA and may require CPR. If the cardiac emergency is in a public place, the location-aware application will alert users in the vicinity of the need for CPR simultaneous with the dispatch of advanced medical care. The application also directs these potential rescuers to the exact location of the closest AED.

The companion app, PulsePoint AED, lets community members report and update AED locations so that emergency responders, dispatch personnel and nearby citizens, can find a nearby AED when a cardiac emergency occurs. Community members can help build the AED registry by using the PulsePoint AED app or aed.new, to describe the location of an AED and add a picture. This information is then staged for local authorities to verify. After that, the AED location data can be made available to dispatchers and anyone using the PulsePoint Respond app.

“With PulsePoint we hope to increase bystander involvement in time-sensitive medical calls by increasing the use of CPR and AEDs, while also keeping the community informed, in real time, of other emergency activities,” said Lt Girdick. “It gives our residents and visitors the ability to know when a cardiac arrest is occurring close by, locate AEDs in the area, and perform potentially lifesaving CPR while our personnel respond to the scene. It also shows them general information for all 9-1-1 calls to keep them better informed of what’s going on in our community.” In 2023, the Orland Fire Protection District responded to 12,739 incidents, including 153 dispatched cardiac arrest events.

“In addition to nearby ‘CPR-needed’ notifications, PulsePoint subscribers can follow their local fire department and choose to be notified of significant events that may impact their family. These informational notifications provide an early and automatic heads-up to local threats such as fires, flooding and utility emergencies," said Richard Price, President of the PulsePoint Foundation. “Improving situational awareness with PulsePoint can help build safer, stronger, and more resilient communities.”

Present at the meeting Tuesday was Orland Resident Don Torgerson. In November of 2023 Mr. Torgerson experienced sudden Cardiac Arrest at a local business. The Orland Firefighters were able to resuscitate him after 7 defibrillations and over 20 minutes of continuous CPR. The Orland Firefighters have one of the highest successful Cardiac save rates in the country. The Firefighters hope that PulsePoint will make these types of success stories even more prevalent in the future. The latest AHA guidelines, published in 2020, state that such community programs could increase bystander CPR to the roughly 350,000 cardiac arrests that happen outside the hospital each year.