Page 84 - Security Today, May 2017

Best Practices in the Healthcare Industry
Identifying organizational needs and existing gaps in emergency communication are the first steps in establishing a comprehensive emergency notification process BHy Greg Smith
ospitals and medical centers face a number of challenges related to ensuring a safe en- vironment for patients, staff, and visitors. Health care fa-
cilities must therefore plan and prepare for emergencies of all kinds, including bomb threats, active shooters, hostage situations, infectious disease epidemics, and inclement weather or natural disasters.
The U.S. Department of Health and Hu- man Services recently released a guide for health care facilities on how to prepare for an active shooter incident. The report, titled “Incorporating Active Shooter Incident Planning into Health Care Facility Emergen- cy Operations Plans,” explains that having emergency notification reporting methods and lockdown procedures in place are im- portant to ensuring everyone’s safety.
The guide goes on to emphasize the im- portance of developing an emergency notifi- cation system that can alert everyone across facilities when an emergency occurs. Accord- ing to the report, “while there is a sense in the popular culture that a clear warning may induce panic, research shows that people do not panic when given clear and informative warnings. Research also shows that people want to have accurate information and clear instructions on how to protect themselves in the emergency.”
Most organizations acknowledge the need for an emergency alerting system, but putting together something comprehensive can be an overwhelming process as it in- volves multiple disciplines within the health care environment.
“Organizations may have email, they may have overhead paging, but then you get to the point of saying ‘how do we begin this whole process of looking at emergency mass notification,” says Peter Lester, national ac- count manager for healthcare at Alertus Technologies.
Boston University, affiliated with Bos- ton Medical Center and located in the heart of Boston, faces a number of unique chal- lenges that led emergency management per- sonnel to seek a campus-wide notification solution. Steve Morash, director of Emer- gency Response Planning at Boston Univer- sity, explains that the first step in the process of establishing an emergency mass notifica- tion system was sitting down to determine the university and medical center’s needs and priorities.
tional picture among our two organizations. Establishing both clear processes and com- munication between the two entities would be essential in establishing a solid emergency notification plan and solution. Boston Medi- cal Center receives a lot of urban trauma cases, which means we need to let people know what’s going on from a safety perspec- tive,” said Morash. “This is something we take very seriously for our nurses, our doc- tors and our patients.”
Morash also discusses the pros and cons of often relied upon on paging systems as- sociated with call directories. Many hospitals use call directories to issue emergency noti- fications to staff; however, Morash explains that these directories are not comprehen- sive and often exclude individuals such as patients and visitors. “You’re going to have people on your campus and in your hospi- tals who are not on those call directories, and how do you let those people know what’s go- ing on,” he said.
To solve these challenges, Boston Uni- versity and Boston Medical Center turned to Alertus Technologies for a comprehen- sive unified facility notification system that would allow them to instantaneously issue a facility-wide emergency notification.
“The Alertus solution allows us to con-
nect multiple command centers so that if someone issues an alert for an emergency, either at the university or the medical center, the message can be set to go to all or select individuals so that everyone is informed of the situation,” said Morash. “Among most organizations that common operational pic- ture becomes very important.”
Boston University is also in the process of building the National Emerging Infec- tious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), which is dedicated to the development of diagnostics, vaccines and treatments to combat emerging and reemerging infectious diseases. These high-containment areas and buildings also require special emergency no- tification solutions.
“In our high-containment labs, we have no real way of notifying our workers in those labs of what may be happening at the univer- sity,” said Morash.
The medical center has since installed 30 wall-mounted Alert Beacon’s in the NEIDL. These devices sound, flash and display a mes- sage when an emergency notification is dis- patched, which has established better com- munication and coordination between the university and the medical center.
Carolinas HealthCare System, a network of hospitals located throughout North and
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“We needed to develop a common opera-
EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION
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