Page 30 - Campus Security & Life Safety, November 2017

HEALTHCARE SECURITY
TIME FOR AN UPGRADE
Cambridge Health Alliance upgrades outdated access and video with AMAG solutions By Kim Rahfaldt
WITH OVER 140,000 PATIENTS IN CAMBRIDGE, SOMER- VILLE, AND BOSTON’S METRO NORTH REGION, CAM- BRIDGE HEALTH ALLIANCE (CHA) PROVIDES PRIMARY CARE, SPECIALTY CARE, EMERGENCY SERVICES, HOSPI- TAL CARE, MATERNITY CARE AND BEHAVIORAL HEALTH TO LOCAL RESIDENTS. AS A HARVARD AND TUFTS UNI- VERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE TEACHING HOSPITAL, CHA ALSO TRAINS THE HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS OF TOMORROW.
But when it came to security, CHA was hampered by the technology of yesterday—its access control system from Casi Rusco company was discontinued and had reached end of life; its video surveillance tech- nology was also outdated.
William Chase, Chief of Public Safety & Security, and Matthew Ter- mini, Deputy Chief of Public Safety & Security, worked together to cham- pion the cause of getting new technology. “I was new to CHA when we first took on the project,” Chase says. “I realized it was a real priority. To me, it’s a force multiplier. We can’t have security officers everywhere. There are key areas where we have to have deploy technology.”
With three hospitals, 15 clinics and 45 buildings, CHA was running about 500 software licenses for access control, and had run out of expansion possibilities, Chase recalls. “At one point we maxed out on the available licenses without upgrading. If we wanted a new card read- er, we had to take an existing one offline to do that.”
Obviously, that wasn’t sustainable for a rapidly growing hospital sys- tem. In addition, the 300 cameras in use were all older analog technology. Chase sought the guidance of security consulting firm KSG Associ- ates LLC to design a workable replacement and put together a request for
proposal. Vincent J. Longobardi, CSPM, was the consultant on the proj- ect. For the access control upgrade, he recommended AMAG Technol- ogy’s Symmetry SR, a range of Symmetry controllers developed specifi- cally as a retrofit solution to Casi Rusco Picture Perfect installations.
“Proper design is important, but having the proper technology partner (in this case, AMAG) and the proper integrator is even more important,” Longobardi says.
Following the RFP, CHA selected Spectrum Integrated Technologies as their integration partner.
“CHA was one of many that had a Casi Rusco system that was end of life,” says Steven A. Feldman, director of Spectrum Integrated Tech- nologies. “They clearly needed to upgrade and the Symmetry SR solu- tion uses the infrastructure, housings, backplane and just replaces the control panels. That allowed them to save a lot of money.”
Chase says data conversion of his existing badge population was an extremely important issue to CHA. “We needed to make sure we could export all of our data fields over. Plug and play controllers also drove the decision.”
MOVING FORWARD
While leveraging the existing infrastructure was important, Chase didn’t just want to have a newer version of similar technology. He and CHA were also looking to build off what they had and take advantage of technology advancements and more integration in the future. “We have 4,000 employees. It needed to be both cost effective and scalable, single platform. We wanted user-friendly and integration with a video management system.
“We are in the process of designing an emergency communication center and it is important to monitor both the access control and video
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