Healthcare Security
Capitol region, and after 9/11 those 13 hospitals formed a non-profit themselves to seek government grants and to plan for regional disas- ters, called the Northern Virginia Hospital Alliance. That alliance actually works for us to gain federal grants for disaster preparedness and response. Out of the money that comes every year, there is a certain percentage of it that the hospitals have agreed to put to a regional cache, so while other hospitals in the country were having a hard time getting PPE during the H1N1 [epidemic], the regional warehouse that we had stocked over the years had that these hospitals could pull from. Jim McNeil: We have recently learned that Joint Commission will be changing their meth- odology for surveys in the future where they will be hold- ing healthcare institutions accountable to CMS standards rather than Joint Commission standards; the importance of that is that Joint Commission standards are very subjective in a lot of ways and are sometimes subject
Jim McNeil administrator, safety and secu- rity, at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
to the interpretation
of particular surveyors. CMS standards are going to be much
more prescriptive and I think there are pros and cons to that, but I think I personally like that because whether you like the stan- dard or not, at least it’s something you can look at and find out how you can comply.
Laura Stepanek: We’ve heard what the challenges are, so to the systems integrators what has stood out in your experi- ence in working with clients in the healthcare field and what trends are you observing in the technologies that you’re implementing? Teresa May: What we keep in mind as we look at that patient-
level security are three key factors: The medical facilities need to maintain an open environment, which we heard from everyone – the idea that security could not interfere with the delivery of medical care. And in addi- tion to providing general secu- rity at their hospitals, medical facilities need to take additional measures for the high risk. We talked about infants at risk of abduction, children in custody dispute, adults at risk of wan- dering, staff violence, and as we take a look at solutions it’s not just a simple integration of sys- tems, but needs to be a solution
Teresa May chief strategy officer for Stanley Convergent Security Solutions (SCSS) and Stanley Healthcare Solutions (SHS)
that contributes to improving the care and efficiency so just a plain security system needs to be interconnected with patient flow systems, nurse presence and other technologies for managing patient care. We’re working together to offer products and services to the hospi- tals to help reduce complexity for users, as well as reduce the overhead and increase overall efficiency in productivity. We’re also looking to push towards hosted solutions for data to benefit from the higher lev- els of security and more proactive management of events. That model is pretty well established in the broader security industry, but from our experience is a little bit newer within the healthcare industry.
6 November 2010 • Solutions By Sector • Healthcare Security
Ed Pederson: The healthcare industry is, by far, the most unique security environment that we have because it’s not like a chemical plant or distribution center or a standard office. They are so entrenched in the community and so very important to the community. They’re so in the public eye and there’s a lot of concern with having an open, warm environment, but at the same time there are a lot of things that they have to protect – infant protec- tion, infection control and prevention, tracking secured substances, tracking prisoners, patient wandering. It’s just an amazing chal- lenge that these folks have to deal with and we attempt to help them using electronics. Some of the trends I’ve seen are integrating the access control and CCTV technology together; that’s really not big news. But physical security information management systems, PSIM, that’s become a popular software solution because you have these guards that, as somebody said earlier, really want it black and white and a lot of these facilities have tight budgets and it’s not like they can replace with the latest and greatest technology. These PSIM systems help bring them all together so that guard can just use one joystick or one computer, look at one monitor and not have to swing back and forth in the security room to manage the system. I see that moving real fast.
The other thing is emergency alert systems (EAS). A lot of hospi-
tals are similar to universities in having campuses where you need to have mass notification either using text or pop-up boxes on people’s computers or display boards that are posted throughout the entire facility or sending voice mails to cell phones. There have been a lot more requests for that kind of technology. One last point is we see that the IT folks are now heavily involved in the electronic side of things; not only are the systems going over the IT networks but the IT folks are now getting the budgets to be able to pay for these things and they’re heavily involved in the decision-making. Ray Cherry: One thing that makes doing security work in hospi- tals unique is if you’re installing an access card reader or a magnetic lock or a camera in part of the hospital that’s in use, you’ve got to go great lengths to make sure the dust doesn’t get out and you have to put up dust bug- gies. It takes a great deal more labor and you’ve got to be more skilled. That’s one thing that sets the hospitals apart from regu- lar security work, is the cleanli- ness and the noise control when you’re doing your work. One thing we’re seeing in
Ray Cherry vice president – sales for Dallas Security Systems
this area is in emergency rooms
the security people are concerned when somebody is shot and they’re brought there as a patient. They’re worried about the person that shot him following him in there and having an issue there in the hospital. One trend we’ve seen here lately is they have beefed up the access and cameras around emergency rooms. Another thing is the control of the information; the access to the computers and the information. A lot of [healthcare facilities] want to have a card and a keypad or a card and fingerprint reader before they can be granted access to either a room or to some of the com- puters to get online. Another thing we’re seeing is some of our hospital administrators
are having us once or twice a year come in and test the magnetic locks to make sure they unlock on fire alarm, which they should anyway
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