The need for better, more secure access control in health care facilities is growing to protect against thefts and other threats; however, facilities must remain open and welcoming, while still maintaining strict access control rules.
The need for better, more secure access control in health care facilities is growing to protect against thefts and other threats; however, facilities must remain open and welcoming, while still maintaining strict access control rules.
Health care facilities entail many different types of establishments, including hospitals, clinics and laboratories. John Davies, MD of TDSi, sees “little difference according to the type of the facility” when it comes to access control. Instead, Davies noted how “the ability to have open protocol integration across multiple sites is becoming more the norm.”
IP-based physical access control systems are also attractive for health care facilities, according to Sheila Loy, Director of Healthcare Solutions for Identity and Access Management in North America for HID Global. “Customers look towards networked access control solutions that simplify infrastructure enhancements and modifications since IP-based solutions can provide a single, integrated system for combining security, access control, video surveillance, and incident response, perimeter detection, and alarm monitoring systems,” she said.
Wireless Locks
When taking into consideration the challenges of health care facilities, such as wandering patients, infant abduction and unauthorized access, certain types of access control systems may be better suited. “An access control system with wired doors and programmable RFID smartcards can solve many of these problems. But conventional wisdom says access control is expensive and cannot be installed everywhere, due to the need for extensive cabling,” said Thomas Schulz, Marketing and Communications Director for EMEA at
Assa Abloy.
Wireless access control systems can overcome the need for extensive cabling and is seeing higher adoption in health care facilities.
Wireless access control systems can overcome the need for extensive cabling and is seeing higher adoption in health care facilities. “Wireless locks are the most affordable way to extend access control throughout a site, greatly enhancing security for a small outlay,” Schulz explained. “What’s more, it doesn’t require you to rip up the current security system and start again … Wireless locks are cost-effective to run, too.”
Budgeting for Access Control
Since access control is part of a security budget, how much a facility spends is based on individual need — there is no one formula. “Implementing access control systems as well as any security technology needs to consider several considerations such as the nature of the operations, location, size, and the reasonably foreseeable risk to be protected against,” said Chad Parris, President of Security Risk Management Consultants.
With that said, Parris noted that “most health care organizations utilize electronic access control systems on perimeter doors such as main entrances, employee entrances, receiving dock, maintenance rooms, specialty clinic entrances, emergency departments, and many others as a standard and a high priority as part of the overall building security system.”
Parris added, “Access control systems on these doors allow the organization to automate some doors through time of day schedules for public access yet maintain secure access at other back of house doors. Interior doors leading into security sensitive areas such as pharmacies, labor and delivery, critical care, and behavior health units are typically seen as higher priorities as well.”
Integrating Access Control
Integrating disparate systems has become a general goal of most facilities, not just in health care. Why manage several different systems if you can integrate them and manage them together? This is in fact the reason why integration and systems that are easy to integrate are now a norm.
While integrating video surveillance with other systems is generally where people start, integrating access control is also a priority. “Access control systems are often seen as the glue or enabler to integrate other physical security systems,” Davies said.
However, Parris advised that the word “integration” means different things to different individuals, and “a clear and concise concept of operations should be defined to assure the client understands not only how the system will function, but also how they must respond, manage and monitor the systems.”
While integrating video surveillance with other systems is generally where people start, integrating access control is also a priority.
“For example, if there is an integration between the access control system and video system, does the live view of the camera simply display on the monitor upon alarm event or is there also the ability to tag that video for future retrieval? These are two very different functions that can be deemed as an integration,” Parris explained.
As such, understanding the integration taking place is vital to its success. “Implementing an integration can also come with many pitfalls if an organization does not fully understand what it takes to properly care and feed for it. Also, understanding that the integration of systems requires that versions of each platform be in lock-step with each other and that the upgrade of any of these systems needs to be fully vetted to assure compliance and that the integration is not broke,” Parris added.
Integration of these new capabilities into older, legacy systems can be challenging. “Over time administrators may want to integrate access control with visitor management, or add video surveillance and other technologies,” said Loy. “This can be difficult to accomplish with legacy systems, which are vulnerable to security threats and can’t easily be upgraded to new features and capabilities. In contrast, the latest physical access control system architectures are based on dynamic technologies, making it significantly easier and less expensive to upgrade them.”
Loy further advised that hospitals could invest in a single, unified IP network, and logically control multiple technologies that previously co-existed only on a physical level. This would allow them to “leverage their existing credential investment to seamlessly add logical access control for network log-on, and achieve a fully interoperable, multi-layered security solution across company networks, systems and facilities.”