Healthcare Security
but just to make sure – they’re paying a lot more attention to that. Bob Fecteau: The thing that really stands out for me in the healthcare field is the sheer number of risks that healthcare institu- tions face that makes them a unique vertical market. What we find when we’re working in the healthcare environ- ment are the unique operational requirements. Because they have to balance the hospital’s unique requirements against their work- flow, we’re often asked to make the systems we put in do spe- cial functions. So as we start to deploy a system, it’s got to be flexible, it’s got to be scal- able because we don’t know what we’re going to be asked to make it do tomorrow. Virtually everything that
Bob Fecteau integrated solutions sales manager for SIGNET Electronic Systems’ Low Voltage Integrated Technologies Division
we’re deploying now is net-
work-based, which means that the technicians in the company as a whole need to be more IT savvy. We’re working with IT profes- sionals now who own these systems – or are at least responsible for their maintenance and operation. We’re seeing a much higher degree of integration – people wanting to do more with the same graphical user interface, see more information, integrate their patient information systems like nurse call systems and so on. The trend that we’ve seen much more, probably due to consolidation, has been standardization. Gone are the days where the client will support multiple platforms across multiple sites. They’re basically demanding standardization.
Laura Stepanek: If you have parking lots and garages within your domain, what are the challenges that you face there and how are you solving them? Linda Fite: We have both ramps and surface lots and of course
we like the surface lots better because it’s a lot easier to keep track of them. Our biggest issue is with car break-ins and the biggest issue with that is trying to get our staff, our visitors to recognize that they should not be leaving visible valuables. It’s rare that someone breaks into a car and there’s nothing that they can see to take. Staff gets extremely upset about that and [ask], “What are you doing about it?” We increase patrols. We’ve sent out alerts if we have a pattern that’s emerging in the ramp. We do what we can, but it’s sort of an unsolv- able problem. We have cameras, we record them, but of course you never get the entire facility. Tony Venezia: We have a large, 4,500-space parking facility on our campus and we also maintain offsite parking locations. We deal with not only overcrowding issues, but the challenge of maintain- ing a safe garage. Tampa General Hospital recently implemented a security Segway patrol that allows our security team to patrol and respond to calls for service quickly. Tampa General Hospital main- tains a relatively safe garage all due to our security presence, constant patrolling of the garage and surveillance equipment.
Like everybody
else we have had vehicle break-ins, accidents and have dealt with unauthorized persons, but we have minimized them with the diligent efforts by our security forces. We’ve installed roughly 95 emergency call stations (Blue-light) at every exit stairwell, increased our lighting and painted it a brighter color. In our efforts to maintain a safe garage, Tampa General
Hospital encourages escorts of our staff and visitors after hours. We have courtesy shuttles that patrol and provide transporta-
Tony Venezia manager of safety/security and transportation at Tampa General Hospital
tion from the garage to the hospital. While cameras are a great deterrent and help with investigations (we have about 500 cameras on the campus) it’s just as important to have a visible security presence inside the garage. Michael Parks: As you can imagine, having a parking garage in a large metropolitan city as Baltimore is very chal- lenging. Mercy Medical Center
has three parking garages; one has been identified as the largest parking garage in Baltimore. [We have] a lot of different security applications for our garage – IP cameras and many, many emergency call boxes, not only on the ends of the driving lanes, but also in every elevator lobby. I think that here in Baltimore we’re a little bit more unique than most of the hospitals across the country. Mercy has had K-9 patrols here at our campus since the early 1990s and I currently have five teams of handlers and dogs here at our hospital. We aggressively patrol the garage with these handlers and their dogs. We also have Segway patrols. All of our garages are posted against
trespassing and individuals that we find trespassing are detained immediately, arrested, and charged with trespassing. We do a lot of work with the downtown partnership, which is an organization here in Baltimore of all the downtown businesses, trying to determine dif- ferent ways in which we can reduce acts of thefts from vehicles. But we are primarily concerned with crimes against people as opposed to crimes against property, because obviously our hospital has a large percentage of its client base coming from outside of the city limits. We would not want to have regular incidents reported on the nightly news, so a lot of emphasis here on the campus is to mitigate incidents where we could have violent acts specifically occurring inside our parking garages. John Williams: Prince William Health System doesn’t have
any parking garages at this time. There’s one on plan. Prior to coming here I was in charge of security at a large university medi- cal center, where we had garages, so I’m familiar with the issues. We had a lot of emergency call boxes in the parking deck and being able to properly identify where that person is calling from so you could get staff there quickly both from a medical emer- gency standpoint and from a criminal standpoint were really the big challenges, and that’s going to be a challenge with our new deck when it’s built as well. You can’t be everywhere at one time. Right now we have three
different roads that traverse the campus, 10 different entrances that you can come off of those three different roads; so keeping an eye on them is really the biggest issue. And with the pressures that we have right now in staffing administration – a lot of times we’ll say, ‘Let’s put a camera over here.’ That’s great after the fact, but we’re not going to be able to watch the camera. We don’t have enough dedi- cated people to do that. We actually need that visible presence in that location in order to deter those things from happening. Jim McNeil: We park about 15,000 cars a day here. We have mul- tiple ramps and external lots. I’m happy to say I don’t have the same experiences as other people on this call. We have a very low incidence of crime in our parking lots, probably attributed to the fact that we’re a low-crime community and we employ a lot of the security measures that other people have already mentioned.
Healthcare Security • Solutions By Sector • November 2010 7
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