Hospitals are a unique environment operating in two worlds, urgent care and safety. Hospitals are unlike other facilities; they are 24/7 operations; they house vulnerable populations; and when people's rights to privacy are defined, hospitals have strict HIPAA privacy requirements to consider. All of these elements create unique complexities in hospital safety and security. As hospitals continue in their digital journey, their methods of physical security may also need to change. The digitalization of physical security, including real-time threat detection combined with smart cameras, will provide hospitals with very different approaches to protecting their staff, patients, and infrastructure.
Changing Needs in Healthcare Security
For some time, most hospitals have relied exclusively on CCTV networks, patrols and alarms, which have been the established safety and security imperatives. While this was important to provide coverage, a reliance on technology exclusively has limitations regarding prevention and/or timely responses towards threats. The encouraging/frequent rise in societal issues such as workplace violence, opioid theft, elopement, and/or limiting access to sensitive areas have been constant reminders of the ineffectiveness of a reaction-only CCTV surveillance model.
Hospitals need and want systems that go beyond recording: systems that interpret, alert and act; systems that are real-time capable. Using AI analytics and night vision, Coram uses virtual Near Infrared Technology (similar to military-grade technology) to address low-light blind spots and expand visibility beyond typical night-time visibility limits. With better detail in corridors, parking structures and intensive care unit (ICU) settings, Coram works to create action-able alerts of threat "risk patterns" the moment they come into detail.
Coram's integrated emergency panic button solutions also add another layer of protection for hospital staff to trigger an immediate response from Security when they are involved in elevated risk situations. In emergency situations, the panic buttons offer meaningful quick-response intervention actions that take place in seconds. This is where AI-powered smart surveillance and cloud-based infrastructure is changing the hospital security systems paradigm.
Smart Cameras: More Than Just Recording
Today's smart cameras offer AI-based video analytics – basically, they can recognize human behavior, objects and spatial change. Smart surveillance systems can detect unusual behavior like loitering around a no access areas, unattended bags or violence in Emergency Departments. Smart cameras run off of machine learning algorithms, allowing the camera's to learn over time and have a reduced false alarm rate and provide security teams the opportunity to concentrate on genuine threats.
A good example is a smart camera in the pharmacy department of a hospital. The camera can alert staff if it detects movement outside the pharmacy operating hours or detects an individual without appropriate credentials entering the space. Similarly, maternity wards can utilize facial recognition or badge identification technology to prevent infant abduction or unauthorized access to the unit.
Real-Time Threat Detection: Quick Saves Lives
One of the best things about the integration of AI-enabled tools in hospitals and smart surveillance, is the ability to get alerts in real-time. AI surveillance solutions do not require the review of video footage after the fact, but have the ability to monitor all footage and send immediate alerts to security or nursing staff when identified anomalies arise.
Real-time detection is extremely beneficial in high-paced environments such as emergency rooms,Frequently, an impulsive outburst, a fall in the hallway, or trespassing into a sterile operating zone will trigger alerts -- and then be outfitted with other security infrastructure like access control and lockdowns or public address systems to provide a comprehensive response.
Cloud Integrated and Scalable
Cloud Video Management platforms (VMS) provide hospitals with unlimited commercialization, centralization, and redundancy. For instance, large health systems with multi-campus operations can monitor all campuses via a single dashboard. Because cloud solutions store video in remote data centers, they do not require expensive, on-site storage. Therefore, hospitals mitigate upfront expensive storage and ongoing upgrades, maintenance, etc., further protecting their capital asset budget.
Security leaders can access footage in real-time, from anywhere - especially critical to security leaders during natural disasters and outages within the hospital. Cloud-based solutions simplify collaboration with local law enforcement officers and emergency responders by providing them access to real-time video, or through a role-based access model.
Protecting Patient, Staff and Hospital Privacy and Compliance
Security is still the most important consideration for facility leaders, however, protecting patient privacy by operating within HIPAA regulations in the United States, or GDPR compliance in Europe, should remain a priority as well. Today's smart surveillance system allows the ability to configure responses to blur faces in non-emergency recording, minimize recording in specific areas (e.g. consultation rooms), and provide comprehensive audit trails to accommodate individuals who accessed previous video and when this footage was accessed. The ability of surveillance systems to help hospitals balance security and confidentiality as a fellow tenant in the hospital is important trust element of healthcare and allied health disciplines.
Future Direction - Predictive Security and AI Adoption
It is anticipated that a higher level of hospital surveillance will introduce an era of predictive security. The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) will not only allow the detection of a threat, but also predict and, ultimately, preempt potential threats. The AI platform permits the identification of historical patterns of behaviors and triggers them in real time based on the identification of conditions that happen before a trigger event, such as an uncontrolled altercations among staff, patient accidents falls, or theft of supplies.
Some hospitals are currently piloting integrated platforms that will extend functionality levels by converging AI vision, on-site access control, and environmental sensor technology through a single emergency management system. These holistic platforms take action by elevating alerts, executing automatic floor lockdowns, and deploying notifications as a component of the emergency response protocol prior to a full-blown emergency.
Conclusion
With the increasing threats to security, hospitals will need to treat the integration of smart cameras and real-time threat detection as not only an opportunity, but as necessity. These capabilities can help change the manner in which healthcare facilities respond to security concerns based on a reactive security posture, and toward a proactive, integrated, and intelligent measures of protection.
By implementing AI-based surveillance, and cloud-based assets, Health (Healthcare) systems can finance their capital investments in technologies to protect patients, staff, protection of contingent workers, asset response time, all without compromising care or compliance. For an industry that can never afford to take a moment more, intelligent hospital security systems are more than a technology. They just may be the investment that saves a life.
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