Access Management

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The Palm Beach County Health Department is a service organization responsible for the health of more than a million residents in Palm Beach County, Fla. It shares responsibility for primary care of the medically indigent population of the county with the private sector.

Failure to maintain an egress as well as failing to protect people from smoke and fire are all too common, yet easy to discern. Better yet, all are preventable through improved staff performance or implementing affordable solutions. Here is a list of ten typical life safety violations along with solutions that can help keep facilities safer for visitors and staff.

At this summer’s Google I/O meeting, attendees were given a sneak peek at Android@Home, a project Google has been working on that will let us control everything in our home right from our Android phones.

A majority of security professionals believe that there is much to gain by integrating data from traditional physical security devices and systems, including access control, video, RFID, GPS, sensors and building management systems, in to one common operating picture.

There are numerous areas to secure in today’s medical facilities. Outside doors, of course, must offer protection against unauthorized access by patients, visitors, employees and outsiders. Similarly, doors to wards, rooms and offices must be safeguarded. But that is only the beginning of the story. There is also a growing need to restrict access to medicine storage cabinets, medicine carts, computers, medical records systems, ambulances and even parking lots.

Ideal for hallway entrance control applications, the Mini-Optical optical turnstile from Smarter Security Systems is an attractive option for buildings looking to automate access control on a smaller budget.

On the heels of the tenth anniversary of 9/11, it is important to reinforce the need to control access into organizations and to properly identify those persons who are seeking access. Controlling access into and within a building or campus not only thwarts a possible terrorist attack, but reduces the opportunity for the commission of a crime or occurrence of a violent act. It also promotes a feeling of security and safety for employees and other persons utilizing the organizational space.

When the 16-acre campus of the new World Trade Center and Memorial and Museum was being designed, architects were solely focused on building the strongest structure they could. But New York City officials targeted their attention to how to secure the perimeter of what is certain to become a significant attraction, expecting to host more than 250,000 travelers per day when it opens in 2014. Diebold, Inc. will design and implement the security system for the facility, where the World Trade Center Transportation Hub will re-establish the transportation infrastructure and facilities in existence before September 11, 2001, and transform Lower Manhattan into the third largest of the transportation center in the city.

According to “Joint Commission Perspectives,” a 2009 survey revealed that the most common types of Joint Commission standards citations given to hospitals were for Life Safety Code violations. In fact, Life Safety Code-related violations were the first, second, fourth and sixth most frequently cited, includinf failure to maintain an egress as well as failing to to protect people from smoke and fire (source: Joint Commission Perspectives). These findings are likely in part to be the result of The Joint Commissions’ increased focus in this area and the addition of Life Safety specialists to the inspection team.

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiner’s (ACFE) 2010 Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abusecompiled 1,843 cases of occupational fraud worldwide between January 2008 and December 2009. The survey estimated that a typical organization lost 5 percent of its annual revenue to fraud with a median loss of $160,000; nearly one-quarter of the frauds involved losses of at least $1 million.