Healthcare facilities face myriad challenges including staffing shortages, budget constraints, increased patient volumes and rising costs. With limited resources to keep patients and visitors safe, hospitals are looking for innovative security solutions to help control costs and improve efficiency. Video surveillance technology has emerged as a practical and effective solution for helping healthcare facilities achieve a balance of quality patient care, safety and overall operational efficiency.

A healthy dose of video surveillance

Video surveillance in healthcare has usually referred to the use of cameras and other monitoring devices to ensure the safety of patients, staff and visitors within the healthcare facility. However, surveillance can also be used to monitor patients and employee activities, to gather insights that can improve patient care and to resolve incidents quickly and effectively. 

Major healthcare facilities throughout the country are installing video surveillance cameras to meet a diverse set of security and surveillance needs. This represents a major shift from pre-pandemic days, when doctors and staff were often hesitant to embrace surveillance technology due to HIPAA compliance and patient privacy concerns. Remote applications used during the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this shift and helped change hospital leaders’ mindset.

AI and analytics are changing the game for healthcare

Healthcare facilities are not simply installing more cameras but deploying cameras with diverse features and capabilities. The average hospital may have between 2,000 and 3,000 cameras monitoring everything from lobbies and parking lots to dispensaries and restricted areas. Realistically, a security professional can only monitor 10 to 20 cameras at a time. With so many feeds to watch, having one security person oversee a video wall is infeasible. For better video management, hospitals are using artificial intelligence (AI) combined with video analytics to shift their security and surveillance approach from reactive to proactive.

AI is being adopted across the healthcare industry as more healthcare facilities take a proactive approach to enhancing patient care and improving operational efficiency. Hospitals are complementing their existing surveillance cameras’ security monitoring with enhanced data-gathering capabilities that combine intelligent audio/video analytics and AI. The result is targeted object detection and classification, which can save time for hospital security teams by speeding up forensic searches. When an incident occurs, locating a person of interest can take a matter of minutes, bypassing having to review hundreds of camera streams.

AI-powered cameras can deliver more accurate detection and classification of people, objects, and vehicles, helping to provide staff with real-time alerts about potentially dangerous activities or persons on the premises. When an incident occurs, staff can enter their search attributes such as “a male in a red shirt and blue pants, between 2:00 and 2:30 am” and get “quick hits” on people or objects that match those parameters in minutes. This process is more efficient than calling a command center with a search request that could take an hour or more to get a response.

Hospitals often maintain watchlists of people whose previous histories prohibit them from being on hospital grounds. With advanced analytics capabilities, a surveillance system can compare images captured on video to existing electronic watchlists that include, for example, anyone who has previously attacked a healthcare provider. If a person on such a watchlist approaches a hospital’s front door, the system automatically notifies security personnel.

AI technology also supports cameras used for license plate recognition that record vehicle entry and exit, allowing security teams to intercept potential suspects before they enter a facility. This allows hospitals to better control facility access and monitor a facility’s population on any given day.

The future of AI in healthcare

AI is transforming the healthcare industry by providing new ways to perform complex automated tasks. Machine learning and deep learning algorithms are emerging as two of the most common forms of AI being used to help detect and classify distinct objects (people, vehicles, faces and license plates) and set them apart from their environmental surroundings. These “smart” technologies filter out irrelevant motion triggers to focus only on people, objects and vehicles, and to show only the events users need to see for effective forensic searches and enhanced operational efficiency. This also minimizes storage and bandwidth use since not every type of object in motion is tracked and recorded.

Multi-directional and pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) technology is beneficial to hospitals from an ROI perspective. With one device through one data connection, a facility can record several key areas like pharmacies, hallways or lobbies with unique fields of view for each.

Beyond monitoring and protection of a facility, new technologies are increasingly being combined to create new surveillance solutions for enhancing patient care.

With the integration of networked PTZ cameras and virtual health platforms, hospitals can perform 24/7 centralized patient monitoring. They can now conduct remote monitoring and observation of various units for applications including tele-sitting, virtual nursing, and virtual admission, discharge and transfer (ADT). Virtual nursing can be a welcome alternative to having a physical tech or nurse act as a “sitter” in a room with a high-risk patient who is likely to fall out of bed, pull out a PICC line or otherwise harm themselves. Hospital staff can remotely check on patients from a central command center at the nurses’ station, keep a close eye on in-room equipment using motorized lenses or view which way the patient’s body is turned.

By deploying cameras with advanced analytics capabilities, healthcare professionals can maintain situational awareness of everything going on within their facility. Video cameras in the operating room help “audit” surgeries to ensure that correct procedures are followed and to provide evidence in such cases as “wrong site surgeries,” in which surgery is performed on the wrong part of a body.

Healthcare facilities need the right surveillance system that delivers more capabilities beyond ensuring security. The potential applications for security cameras are endless, but achieving a balance of quality, efficiency, patient care and safety will continue to be the ultimate mission for all hospitals.