A Picture of Health

Jun 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Corrina Stellitano

This May, Memorial Medical Center in Springfield, Ill., introduced a new CT scanner capable of creating a three-dimensional picture of a patient's heart and coronary arteries in 10 seconds.

For security professionals at Memorial Medical, it takes another electronic system to track a different type of life-blood. As the center's mission statement recognizes: “More than buildings and equipment, people are Memorial Health System.”

Last year, the 562-bed Memorial Medical Center discharged more than 20,000 patients and treated more than 400,000 people on an outpatient basis. More than 3,500 employees and 550 physicians helped accomplish the task. Keeping safe all of these patients, their families and employees — the life-blood of the 2.7-million-square-foot facility — takes a cohesive assembly of surveillance and access control technologies.

Protecting assets from adult to infant

The renovation of the hospital's access control and CCTV systems began several years ago. Bennett Electronic Service Co., a Pontiac, Ill.-based system integrator, first began working with Memorial Medical to install an IDentiPASS PLUS system by IDenticard.

“The hospital had several systems in use, and the long-range plan was to reduce the traffic down to several managed entrances and exits,” says Mike Corrigan, Bennett project manager. “Eighty percent of what we do is retrofit. Every single door is its own challenge.”

More than 200 doors are now protected with a combination of keypads, card readers, magnetic locks and electric strikes. In addition to door access, employees use their photo ID badges in the hospital cafeteria, for time-and-attendance and for entry into hospital parking lots.

The concept that the hospital must remain open for visitors and convenient for employees was emphasized throughout the installation. “We want to be a leader and prevent before something occurs,” says hospital security director Richard Montcalm. “But, a big challenge is that you have to be very open with your visitors. You can't just lock down the facility. It's more of an open environment.”

Doors in particular departments are customized for their users. “All (medical center) employees carry photo ID badges with embedded prox chips,” Corrigan says. “But for many of the doctors who prefer not to carry badges, we have installed combination prox/keypad readers so the doctors can use their dictation codes for access.”

In the OB/GYN areas, an eXI Halo Infant Security System provides strict security for the newly arrived infants.

“All of the doors, as well as several elevator banks that open on that floor, are surrounded by a detection field,” Corrigan says. “Each new infant is fitted with a special tag that is skin sensitive. Once activated, any tampering or removal of the tag from the infant will signal an alarm within the system.”

Antennas hidden in the ceiling blanket the department with coverage to monitor the status and location of all assigned tags in real-time. Nurses can locate every infant with an assigned tag and quickly pinpoint alarm locations on virtual floor plans displayed on 19-inch flat screen monitors located around the department. An identical display screen is also located in the Security Department.

“If that tag gets near an exit, the system will lock that door or elevator,” Corrigan says. “And if someone were to remove the tag in an effort to defeat the system, the resulting tamper alarm would lock down the perimeter doors and elevators, preventing any exit from the area.”

Integrating the access control system with the eXI Halo system also allows security officers to enter even when the department is locked down.

Breaking down the wall

While Bennett's staff members were working on the new access control system, Corrigan got his first glimpse of what he affectionately called, “the wall of shame.”

“It was an entire wall of old black-and-white 9-inch monitors, switchers, multiplexers, and time-lapse VCRs and a mess of cables. There was an entire wall of videotapes used for archiving video, rotated from the VCRs each night at midnight. It was probably state-of-the-art gear when it was new, but you couldn't really track anyone,” he says. “It just made sense to tackle the CCTV system during this extensive access control installation.”

The facility's 140+ black-and-white cameras, and various monitors, VCRs, switchers and multiplexers have now been replaced with Vicon digital cameras and 10 Vicon Kollector DVRs. The system incorporates a variety of fixed and PTZ cameras, accessible for viewing through desktop PCs.

“In several locations, we have set up the clinical directors with password-protected access to just the cameras in their areas,” Corrigan says. “This allows them to view their cameras, review recorded data, and even store video on CD, right from their desktop PCs.”

This networked system even covers Memorial Medical buildings across town. Additional cameras and DVRs are located in remote locations miles from the main campus. The video from these locations is routed back to Memorial's Security Department via the facility's wide area network (WAN) and is monitored seamlessly along with the other cameras.

During the 18-month multi-phase project, Bennett first tackled the replacement of the recorders. “The first priority was replacing the recorders and organizing the miles of cables that come back to that point,” Corrigan says. Then the hospital operations personnel, along with Bennett's technicians, installed the cameras.

At Memorial Medical, 21 security officers maintain dispatch and monitor the surveillance cameras, answering 10,000 calls for service each year. Calls can include the supervision of bank deposits, patient monitoring or escorting people to and from vehicles.

The digital camera feeds are monitored by a security officer on flat screen monitors. Sensitive areas are shown at all times, and updates from area hospitals give officers warnings of suspicious visitors. “We try to work really closely with our neighboring hospitals. If someone is wandering through hospitals stealing, they would give us a description,” Montcalm says.

Both Corrigan and Montcalm compare the hospital system to a small city. Cooperation of the many communities or departments within the hospital city was essential. “To make it happen, we had to crawl through the bowels of the hospital,” Corrigan says. “A good relationship with the hospital mechanical and engineering departments and plant operations is essential.”

Employee acceptance of the systems has been improved through education and a flexibility shown by hospital security officials and installers. When necessary, systems were carefully customized for the needs of specific departments.

“When we first went with the prox readers, the staff was a little bit apprehensive,” Montcalm says. “But once we educated the personnel and staff, it's been very smooth and I believe that is a result of the education process.”

Corrigan agrees: “It's a matter of getting that info out there and being available whenever they have questions.”

And success is the best persuasion. “It really opens eyes, for instance, when there is an incident, and we can easily locate the footage,” he says. “In the past, it was so hard to find the video surveillance section you were looking for, and the quality was terrible. Now we can quickly print freeze frames, export the footage to JPEG or AVI files, or burn a proprietary, authenticated video footage to CD.”

---

ABOUT THE COMPANIES

For information, circle the Reader Service number (listed below) or visit securitysolutions.com

Bennett Electronic Service Co.	10
eXI Wireless	11
IDenticard Systems	12
Vicon	13

Want to use this article? Click here for options!
© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

This month in Access Control

• Opening Up About Door Closers
• An Enterprise Approach
• The Framework For Open Systems
• On A Higher Plane
• More from April's issue