ShareHospital Security Requires Tight Cooperation with IT
I recently had a chance to visit PinnacleHealth in Harrisburg, Pa. This is the leading hospital and healthcare system in central Pennsylvania with a 130-year tradition of offering medical services from prenatal to geriatrics. Securing a 607-bed hospital with thousands of patients, clinicians, employees and visitors every day of the year can be a daunting task. To meet that challenge security has long been of vital strategic importance at PinnacleHealth.
Video surveillance plays an important role in those security plans with more than 270 IP-based cameras on the system. With that much video moving over the hospital’s network, PinnacleHealth’s IT department has been intimately involved from the beginning of the switch to an entirely IP-based system.
Chris Mohr, a PinnacleHealth network analyst, said there was never any doubt that the already robust network infrastructure left it better suited than most for IP-based video and access control systems.
“We were already moving large information packets such as MRIs and ultrasounds as part of our PACS system, which are much more of a bandwidth hog than security video,” he said.
According to David Falgoust, PinnacleHealth’s director of security services, the IT team has always been very responsive to the needs of his department.
“The IT department has never said it doesn’t want to be involved,” he said. “The people there have always said, ‘Let us know how we can help.’ That is a big advantage for us as a security team.”
As the system integrator, ADT also maintains its own dedicated team of IP engineers that are available to PinnacleHealth at anytime they are required. Pinnacle has provided ADT with three tokens allowing its network engineers to remotely diagnose the system to solve any problems that might arise at any time or day. Also, ADT has provided personnel to be on the hospital campus as Pinnacle requires.
Today’s highly sophisticated security systems require tight cooperation between security and the IT departments. PinnacleHealth gets that.
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