By Sherry Greenfield
Baltimore Sun
CARROLL COUNTY, Md. — As the Carroll County Department of Fire and Emergency Medical Services continues to come together, approval was granted to renew a software system that provides centralized training and record-keeping.
The Board of Carroll County Commissioners unanimously approved at their meeting Thursday the renewal of the Lexipol Fire & EMS Learning Platform software system. The $48,020 cost is included in the current fiscal 2024 county budget.
Lexipol, LLC is a training company based in Frisco, Texas, that provides policy manuals, training bulletins and consulting services to law enforcement agencies, fire departments and other public safety departments, according to its website.
In 2022, the previous Board of County Commissioners approved for the first time the purchase of the Lexipol software system for $48,020. Before then, the department had no centralized training credentialing or record-keeping system in place, other than file cabinets filled with outdated information, a county briefing paper states.
“This system allows both the career and the volunteer members to partake in online training,” said Dennis Brothers, assistant chief of training, health and safety for the Department of Fire and EMS.
The software is used by the department and volunteer companies for compliance testing, which includes hazmat and bloodborne pathogens.
The platform also provides access to training mandated by the state as well as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and other required training. It also allows the department to track its training compliance.
“So, this system keeps all the records for us,” Brothers said. “We also use this for the volunteers and career in a different way also. We recently provided sexual harassment training to all the members, not just our operational members. …We were able to schedule their training and then we could monitor it to make sure everyone received the training.
“It’s also a good way for our volunteers, our individual companies, so they can do their own thing,” he said. “Each one of them has their own administrator. They can put their own individual programs online and monitor how they’re progressing, and then have a record of their individual folks.”
Commissioners made little comment when approving the purchase.
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