Denise’s Legacy: QA Every Day.

On January 17, 2008, Denise Amber Lee called 911 for help from her abductor’s car. A witness called too, remaining on the line for nine minutes and providing a precise, real-time location as officers searched nearby. That critical information never reached the responding officers in time. Denise was murdered.

In the years that followed, her husband, Nathan Lee, turned unimaginable loss into lasting change by founding the Denise Amber Lee Foundation. Through training, education, and the promotion of quality assurance (QA) and call review, the Foundation helps emergency communications centers identify opportunities to improve. So critical lessons are learned before another family experiences the same tragedy.

The number that defines the problem is 1–3%.

That’s the fraction of 911 calls most agencies can realistically review under today’s manual QA processes. The other 97–99% of every interaction — in a workflow where every second matters — goes unreviewed.

But the challenge isn’t just coverage. It’s creating a culture where QA becomes an ongoing development tool, not simply a process to complete. Too often, feedback arrives weeks after the call, when the details have faded and the opportunity to learn together has passed. The goal of QA isn’t documentation. It’s growth.

The Emergency Communication Centers (ECCs) with the best outcomes aren’t the ones with the most compliance audits. They’re the ones with the best cultures.

When we introduced RapidSOS QA at Innovation Day 2026, we showed the 911 community what was possible: 100% automated call scoring powered by HARMONY AI. The response was immediate — and the question that followed was just as fast: How do we actually use this?

Today, we have the answer.

Telecommunicators handle life-and-death calls every shift — a rollercoaster of trauma, urgency, and professional pressure. They deserve to be evaluated by a program built with as much care as they put into those calls. Every other QA tool grades a dispatcher. This one was built by people who understand what it means to be one.

RapidSOS and the Denise Amber Lee Foundation have formed a partnership to co-deliver the most complete QA program in public safety — one that touches 100% of calls not to find fault, but to build a culture of excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement across the entire floor. HARMONY AI scores every call automatically, every score tied to the exact transcript moment that triggered it. The Foundation’s certified QA professionals set up and calibrate your first 10 scorecards, guide your QA workflow, and customize with your QA managers — so your floor has a program worthy of the people running it. Built into UNITE. Included in the cost of your RapidSOS QA subscription.

Most agencies struggle to hit even the 1–3% manual QA standard. Supervisors are stretched thin. Scorecards are built once and forgotten. Development conversations happen quarterly, if at all.

You’ll find other AI QA tools on the market. They will score your calls. They will give you dashboards. And then they will leave you to figure out the rest:

• How to build scorecards that match your protocols.
• How to calibrate them as your operations evolve.
• How to customize a score for unique needs and behavior. 

That is not a complete program. That is a tool with a manual nobody reads. That is a house without the furniture or decor to make it a home.

Under this partnership, RapidSOS and the Denise Amber Lee Foundation are delivering a fully integrated program where AI and human expertise are designed to work together from day one. The Foundation’s certified QA evaluators do not just consult; they co-deliver. They set up your scorecards. They calibrate them as your operations change. They review the calls that need human judgment. And they turn every finding into a customizable framework your supervisors can use immediately.

For nearly two decades, the Denise Amber Lee Foundation has championed quality assurance as a cornerstone of stronger emergency communications. Through training, certification, and education, they have helped agencies build programs that prioritize continuous learning and improvement.

That philosophy aligns closely with RapidSOS’ vision for QA.

Together, we’ve combined RapidSOS’ AI-powered quality assurance platform with the Foundation’s expertise in customization and calibration. The result is a comprehensive offering that brings trusted QA practices together with technology designed to support the culture of human excellence you are building, not dehumanize it with technology in isolation.

Every agency that subscribes to RapidSOS QA receives:

• Scorecard setup and customization — Denise Amber Lee Foundation-certified evaluators build your first 10 scorecards to match your agency’s protocols and call types.
• Ongoing calibration — Quarterly touchpoints to adjust scorecards as your operations, staffing, and priorities evolve.
• Access to the national DALF community — Best practices, peer benchmarks, and continuous learning from QA professionals across the country.

None of this is an add-on. None of it is a separate purchase. It is built into the cost of RapidSOS QA for the length of your contract, and embedded with UNITE, eliminating the need for an additional screen.

We have heard the same feedback from ECC directors who have looked at AI QA: the technology is impressive, but the implementation is intimidating. Or, the technology is not built specifically for the needs of public safety, and AI becomes a divisive topic. Scorecards take weeks to build. Calibration is a mystery. Development is still manual. And six months after purchase, the dashboard is live but the culture has not changed.

That is the gap this partnership closes. RapidSOS provides the AI — 100% call scoring, evidence-linked grades, flagged-call queues, and closed-loop learning that gets smarter with every review. Denise Amber Lee Foundation provides the human expertise that turns those scores into growth. Together, we deliver a program that agencies can deploy on day one and improve continuously — without hiring consultants, without buying training modules, without wondering if they are doing it right.

The result is not just better QA scores. It is a different kind of center. One where feedback is specific, timely, and tied to the exact moment in the call. Where supervisors spend less time building scorecards and more time developing people. Where the 97–99% of calls that used to go unreviewed are now sources of insight — and the culture of continuous improvement becomes the norm, not the exception.

This partnership exists because both organizations believe the same thing: QA is not a compliance checkbox. It is a culture lever. The best QA scores come from centers where feedback is specific and timely, and where every call is an opportunity to get better at the most consequential job in public safety.

Nathan Lee has spent seventeen years advocating for that culture. RapidSOS has spent 10 years building the technology to make it scalable. For the first time, both are available in a single program — and the 911 community does not have to choose between innovation and expertise.

We’re bringing this to NENA in Columbus. If you want to see what 100% QA coverage looks like for your agency — your call types, your rubric, with the Foundation’s human layer built in — come find us at the event.