Lake County will use AI to review medical 911 calls, with supervisors keeping final personnel authority

The next time a Mentor resident dials 911 with a medical emergency, the recording of that call will first run through artificial intelligence software that assesses how the dispatcher handled it.

On Sept. 29, 2026, the Lake County Board of Commissioners approved a five-year agreement with Eventide Communications to add AI quality-assurance software to the county's existing 911 call-recording system. The contract costs $45,340 in its first year and $36,369 in each of the following four years — roughly $190,816 over five years. Under the plan, the software automatically reviews 100% of calls classified as emergency medical dispatch calls, the ones where a dispatcher gives pre-arrival medical instructions, replacing the small sample supervisors used to listen to by hand. The new system will be listening across a big room: Lake County Central Communications handled 83,956 emergency 911 calls in 2024. The change lands in the moment a neighbor calls for an ambulance — a heart attack, a fall, an unresponsive child — and a dispatcher talks them through what to do until help arrives.

The software is the county's chosen way of answering a new state requirement. Ohio Administrative Code Rule 5507-1-20, effective May 25, 2026, requires every 911 dispatch center to maintain a quality-assurance program that reviews at least 2% of calls in which emergency medical dispatch pre-arrival instructions were or should have been provided, with calls selected across all operational shifts. For Lake County, that 2% works out to roughly 272 calls a year that would otherwise need a manual listen. County officials say the AI lets them leap from that small fraction by hand to a full review of every emergency medical dispatch call — an expansion driven by the new state rule, not a project the county initiated on its own. Capt. Daniel Bachnicki, Lake County's 911 coordinator, put it plainly: "This software allows us to actually review 100% of our EMD calls and gives us a report."

The county's central promise is that a person, not a program, holds the final say. Supervisors and administrators — not the software — will make the final evaluations, provide coaching, and determine whether any corrective action or discipline is needed; the county's stated position is that the AI does not itself make personnel decisions. Eventide, the vendor, describes its Critical Insights AI quality-assurance system as keeping a "human in the loop," with final decisions remaining with people rather than the AI. Bachnicki, Lake County's 911 coordinator, said the reports show "where we're lacking, or where we're excelling, in providing the information or obtaining the information from the caller."

Eventide's Quality Factor AI is what begins each review. It grades each recorded call against evaluation forms aligned with national dispatch standards or customized by the county, checking whether required questions were asked and procedures followed. The software assigns high, moderate, or low confidence to each finding, then flags individual calls and broader trends for supervisor attention. That means the calls a supervisor scrutinizes, and the moments within them, are first picked out by the AI. A human supervisor's judgment arrives at the end of a process the software sets in motion: the person holds the gavel, but the machine decides which cases are placed before it and which moments are pointed out.

Here is where the new system gets quiet. The Ohio rule governing these reviews spells out only what the county must count and report: the total number of EMS incidents, the total calls reviewed, and the total calls for which pre-arrival instructions were provided. That is an aggregate tally, not a mechanism that opens any individual call to review by the caller. The rule itself establishes no right for callers or the public to access an individual quality-assurance review, and no process within the rule to appeal a review or its results. A person who dialed 911 in the middle of a crisis finds no explicit route through the rule itself to see what the grading of their own call found, or to challenge it.

This is the system that answers medical calls in and around Mentor. Lake County Central Communications provides enhanced 911 and computer-aided dispatch service for 12 law-enforcement agencies and 9 fire and EMS agencies, and serves as the backup public safety answering point for the city of Mentor and Madison Township dispatch. Mentor operates its own 24-hour primary center — the City of Mentor Safety Forces Communication Center — which answers and dispatches Mentor police, fire, and EMS calls, while Lake County Central Communications answers countywide wireless and cellular 911 calls and backs up Mentor's center. For a Mentor resident whose cell-phone 911 call lands at the county center, the next medical emergency on their street is graded in part by AI software, and the human who holds final authority over any coaching or discipline is a county supervisor — not the caller, whom the quality-assurance rule itself gives no window into the review of their own crisis.