Healthcare Focuses On Video Surveillance

Hospitals and medical centers face a number of challenges related to ensuring a safe environment for patients, staff, and visitors. Health care facilities must therefore plan and prepare for emergencies of all kinds, including bomb threats, active shooters, hostage situations, infectious disease epidemics, and inclement weather or natural disasters. These healthcare surveillance requirements create an increase in video surveillance data, and managing this infrastructure takes an intelligent, scalable storage platform.

Industry analyst IHS projects video surveillance will capture nearly 6000 Petabytes of data in 2017, and by 2019 3.3 trillion hours of surveillance video will be captured daily. Video is also being retained longer for many reasons, including for use as evidence by law enforcement or to use with advanced analytics in retail environments.

Healthcare Focuses on Video Surveillance

Healthcare is in a state of flux. New regulations, new requirements and the inexorable march of technological change is driving an avalanche of changes. In years past video surveillance was relegated to the backroom of security officers as a necessary evil. Today forward thinking health organizations are realizing the video surveillance is two key things:

Video
Data

And the more video you have the more data you have. And data is the life blood of modern medical organizations.

Some of the benefits that video surveillance provides healthcare providers include:

Keeps patients’ records and identities safe
Ensures staff are meeting health and safety standards
Allows for remote monitoring from a smartphone or tablet
Prevents intruders from gaining access to restricted areas
Deters vandalism and other criminal acts
Increases safety for patients and staff

Video systems are also impacted by HIPAA in the United States and by similar privacy legislation around the world. When a physical security system is installed in a healthcare environment, patients’ privacy must be protected according to HIPAA’s specific rules. A patient’s PII – or personally identifiable information – must be protected. PII is any information that can be used to uniquely identify, contact or locate an individual, or that can be used with other sources to uniquely identify a person.

With video surveillance, cameras must be positioned in such a way that they don’t violate HIPAA laws. If a camera is pointed to a computer screen or something else that contains a patient’s PII, there must be an option to draw a privacy window within the frame so that a patient’s sensitive information isn’t easily accessed or compromised. An advanced Video Management System like Milestone XProtect provides these types of advanced features and our Shield-Key surveillance platform running Milestone supports 50% more cameras than similar priced NVR’s.

Healthcare systems represent one of the most challenging environments to secure. The need to balance an appropriate level of security while providing a welcoming environment geared towards patient care is essential. Video security deployments for hospitals often share characteristics such as being a multi-site deployment requiring centralized monitoring and the need to integrate a diverse but complimentary set of security technologies. These requirements drive planning and design considerations of video surveillance and enterprise VMS deployments.