Hospital Requires IP-Surveillance for Remote Monitoring Challenges

Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center needed a surveillance alternative to trenching cable between its main building and remote parking lot.

Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center on Long Island, N.Y., had begun construction on a satellite parking lot for employees when security staff quickly realized that the lot’s remote location posed a surveillance challenge. Located several blocks from the main building, it would be both disruptive and expensive to trench cable between the new parking lot and the main building’s security operations center for 24/7 monitoring.

With analog technology, the alternative would require hardwiring the cameras at the new 750-space parking lot to an intermediary building—an affiliated nursing home—negating the possibility of live monitoring.

Instead, Good Samaritan Hospital Medical Center looked to migrate to a single, unified IP-based surveillance system, which also would provide better image quality and increased functionality. Additionally, when the security department relocated its operations center to a different hospital wing, the network-enabled video still could be easily accessed without having to reroute the 144 existing analog cameras.

“Sometimes with analog video you can barely make out a person in the car. With the quality of our new digital video system, we can now focus on a face, read a license plate or even an employee sticker on a car,” said Bill Fagan, director of security for Good Samaritan.

With employee safety and vehicle security top of mind, A+ Technology Solutions, a N.Y.-based integrator, designed a wireless solution to transmit video from an array of Axis Communications pan/tilt/zoom (PTZ) network cameras back to the hospital using a relay atop the nursing home to bounce the video stream to the main hospital.

An IP-based surveillance solution helped one Long Island hospital meet its security challenges.

In addition, A+ Technology connected an access control system for the parking lot gate to a Motorola PTP500 55MBPS Link and installed emergency call buttons at four bus shelters. The call buttons allow employees to request a shuttle bus or report an emergency.

The entire system is controlled centrally by an intuitive DynaView video management system (VMS) from IPVideo Corporation. The system includes a logistical overlay—either a Google Earth view or a parking lot blueprint—of each camera’s location, allowing security staffers to click on a camera icon and know exactly which video stream they are watching.

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