Memphis, Tennessee, Mayor A C Wharton, Jr. presented a life-saving challenge to IBM. His proposal, to streamline the city’s EMS service, earned the city an IBM Smart Cities Challenge Grant. As a grant recipient, Memphis will receive assistance from a team of IBM professionals to develop a solution to the challenge.

Memphis wanted to weed out the nonemergency calls from the true emergency calls in its EMS service. “Of the 120,000 calls a year we receive, about 25,000 are not emergencies,” Wharton told theCUBE during IBM Edge2015. “That takes valuable time and resources away from the true emergency calls.”

Memphis keeps technologically up to date

Memphis will also receive a Twitter Data Grant, which will allow it to use Twitter data to make decisions. Certainly, Memphis, a city steeped in musical history, is technologically up to date.

Wharton plans to call upon IBM’s expertise to help it leverage Twitter data as part of the EMS project.

“We know Memphis, but IBM knows the world,” Wharton said. He believes that the IBM Smart Challenge team will help the city determine how to use the data to provide day-to-day solutions.

“For our EMS project, we’re looking at using nurses as dispatchers or possibly sending nurses to the homes of individuals that we call ‘frequent fliers,’ who often call when it’s not truly an emergency,” Wharton explained. “You have to have the ability to analyze data in real time and apply the right solution. This is why IBM’s expertise on a worldwide basis is so critical.”

The Smarter Planet initiative creates ripple effects

Jen Crozier, VP of IBM’s Global Citizenship Initiatives, also joined theCUBE to discuss the grant process. Crozier explained that over 600 mayors have applied for grants over the life of the program, and IBM has delivered 115 teams.

“When we started building the Smarter Planet initiative, one of the things we considered was where our efforts would have the biggest ripple effect,” she said. “That’s cities. More than half the world’s population lives in cities, and that number is growing every day. We’ve been really gratified by this program.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Edge2015.