Education

As students and teachers begin the new school year, they are once again required to prepare for the threat of a mass shooter. There have been 16 school shootings this year as of August 2026, and for the first time a parent has been charged alongside their child who committed the crime. In this 2024 article, Michael Peveler highlights how emergency and mass communications can help keep our students and teachers safe.

Healthcare

Another area where emergency communication is especially important is the healthcare industry. The emergencies a hospital needs to deal with not only include security concerns but the many medical emergencies that may occur. Hospital staff need quick, reliable ways to call for help, ones that don’t inhibit their ability to provide life-saving care. Is a patient or family member becoming agitated? Is there a hazardous material spill in the Emergency Room? Is a patient in the waiting room experiencing a medical emergency? Each instance requires a different solution and therefore requires a different alert. In this 2023 article, former Security Editor-in-Chief provides suggestions for leveraging mass notification within the healthcare sector.

The plight of violence against healthcare workers in recent years has added an additional layer to the need for fast communication in the healthcare field. Doctors and nurses need a way to call for help without escalating a situation, such as a disoriented or volatile patient. An article by Paul Shain highlights how a mass notification system can help protect healthcare providers.

Airports

The nature of airports means that thousands of different people move through the facility each day. Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, Georgia, for example, sees over 200,000 passengers a day. That number doesn’t include TSA agents, security personnel, pilots and flight attendants, or the retail and restaurant staff who help keep the airport operational. This can raise questions of who needs to be notified for each situation, and how to prevent notifications from getting lost in an endless stream of information. A lost child, for example, requires a different alert than a gate change. An article by Matt Czyzewski highlights some ways mass notification can work within an airport.

“Doctors and nurses need a way to call for help without escalating a situation, such as a disoriented or volatile patient.”

Alert Fatigue and Preventing Burnout

A top concern for alert-heavy environments is alert fatigue. Individuals become so used to the constant string of alarms that they begin to ignore them, causing a delay in threat remediation. Alert fatigue can also lead to burnout in security personnel, who may feel as if they’re playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. This article by Eddie Everett highlights some of the risks associated with alert fatigue for security leaders. “With companies annually spending hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars on data collection, it is no surprise that alerts would come in fast and hot. But the firehose of alerts can be mind-boggling. Employees can spend extensive time investigating and triaging, or responding to, alerts, many of them manually,” Everett says.

Prevention methods can include taking a closer look at who receives each alert. Which situations are department-specific, and what triggers an organization-wide notification? Do off-duty staff need to be notified right away or when they come in for their next shift?

Ensuring messages remain clear, quick, and focused can make all the difference in an emergency situation.