Real-Time Visibility to Improve Care & Safety
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare industry is currently facing significant obstacles in managing capacity and providing patient care with limited resources. In this article, we explore how video surveillance is utilized for remote patient monitoring, risk mitigation, and protocol compliance across hospitals, urgent care centers, and clinics to help overcome these hurdles.
Challenges and use cases for video surveillance include, but are not limited to, the topics below:
- Managing Temporary Patient Rooms or Areas: Ensuring patient care and staff safety at temporary patient care facilities, such as field hospitals or pop-up clinics
- Remote Patient Monitoring: Providing visibility while reducing exposure and overuse of personal protective equipment (PPE)
- Preventing Patient Overflow: Emergency room crowding and managing occupancy level with social distancing
- Fast Incident Resolution: Efficiently relaying video to law enforcement to facilitate rapid response time
Additionally, certain security system features can better address these challenges and facilitate a more seamless deployment. Jump to each section to learn more.
1. Managing Temporary Patient Rooms or Areas
To prevent overcrowding, many hospitals have set up temporary locations for patient care that include—but are not limited to—isolation rooms in an existing ward, field hospitals, and pop-up tents. Video security can be an effective method to remotely monitor and ensure patient care when there are not enough staff members to make rounds onsite. Being temporary locations, providing coverage in these areas often requires solutions with remote access and minimal networking requirements.
Offsite Access to Live Video Feeds
When staffing levels are a concern, video surveillance can be used to remotely monitor and ensure patient care. An effective healthcare surveillance system should be able to provide secure remote access to live and historical video footage from a designated viewing station, computer, or mobile device.
Deploying with Limited Network Connectivity
Because they are often removed from the main hospital campus, one challenge seen in temporary patient care facilities is deploying cloud-based cameras with limited or no network connectivity. A video security solution therefore needs to be able to operate on low bandwidth or support alternative connections such as cellular connections. Choosing a system with a hybrid cloud infrastructure, in which footage is stored both locally and in the cloud, can help ensure no gaps in coverage occur as a result of camera or network downtime.
2. Securing Patient Data
By providing healthcare personnel with the ability to check on patient areas remotely, video security can be used to mitigate staffing shortages that many hospitals are experiencing because of COVID-19. To adequately protect patient data, some considerations for a security system include HIPAA compliance and user provisioning.
HIPAA Compliance
When it comes to healthcare, a security system must be able to meet the necessary requirements to protect PHI and ePHI data that may be recorded or transmitted. Many DVR, NVR, or pure cloud-based camera systems may pose a risk to HIPAA violation if proper security infrastructure is not in place.
Segmented User Access and Permissions
To balance privacy with patient care, access to historical footage and certain cameras should be restricted to key healthcare personnel. Healthcare security systems should allow for custom user permissions to be set based on sites and roles—as well as individual cameras where sensitive data may be stored. Beyond that, permissions should include a live-only viewer mode in which users can only view camera live streams, with no option to access past footage, save snapshots, or share video to a third-party.
3. Remote Patient Monitoring
As hospital systems are currently experiencing or preparing for patient overflow, video analytics can be a useful tool for occupancy management and risk mitigation. A security camera system equipped with people counting and heatmapping can offer visibility into real-time capacity, and may be included as part of a recommended management action plan.
Motion-Based Alerts
Social distancing measures now limit the maximum number of people allowed in facilities at a time, with many essential organizations marking 6 feet of distance at places where people need to gather. A surveillance system with motion-based notifications can alert staff when people are detected in-frame, so they can easily assess the scene and ensure protocol compliance.
Heatmapping and Motion Plotting
Heatmaps can be used to identify high-traffic areas and provide a high-level view of social distancing compliance. Site managers can view real-time heatmaps to see where patients are gathering for example, and ensure there is no movement towards sensitive or high-risk areas.
4. Incident Resolution
When incidents do occur, whether it’s aggressive behavior or theft, response time is key to ensuring that the impact is minimal. Though there are a number of features that could be important depending context, being able to identify incidents in real-time and pull footage quickly are essential to most cases.
Proactive Alerts
Surveillance systems with proactive alerts can notify users the moment an incident is occurring in-frame during a certain time period. This can be an efficient way to protect sensitive areas, such as medical equipment or medicine storage closets, and reduce the cost of overhead in hiring a round-the-cloud security team.
Remote, Live Video Sharing
While many traditional CCTV systems with NVRs and DVRs require users to be onsite in order to retrieve footage, modern solutions offer remote access and quick sharing features. Some systems have options to share live footage directly to law enforcement through SMS or weblink from an app- or web-based browser. In situations where timing is critical, incidents can be efficiently and effectively resolved with these core functions.
Surveillance Solutions
To learn more about how some of the nation’s busiest hospitals are utilizing video security, explore some customer stories.
To learn more about receiving a camera trial for your organization, read about the COVID-19 Remote Monitoring Program.