Addressing Security Pitfalls in Health Care Facilities

Glenn Farrant, co-founder and CEO, CriticalArc, highlights security pitfalls in health care settings, and shares interesting stories, lessons learned, and tips for health care professionals to ensure all staff feel safe in their workplace.

What are some security pitfalls in health systems and hospitals?

The safety of health care workers is a critical component of patient care. It’s also a top-of-mind concern for health care providers, given that nearly 75% of workplace assaults occur in a health care setting, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In our experience, three primary security pitfalls in health systems and hospitals leave health care workers vulnerable to workplace assault:

• Lean staffing. Even before the pandemic, labor expenses as a percentage of hospital expenses had steadily increased since 2008; during COVID-19, labor expenses grew 5.4%. As hospitals seek to curb labor costs by staffing fewer employees and using automation to maintain quality and productivity, operating with fewer staff creates vulnerabilities for team members. As a result, hospital staff need better tools to maintain visibility in the health care environment and help coordinate a fast and effective response when workers are at risk.

• Inconsistent enterprise standards. With the tremendous growth in hospital consolidation, many newly integrated systems lack consistency in safety and security across their locations. This can confuse and sometimes frustrate staff who travel between locations. It also puts employees at risk when they need to memorize the different processes for engaging help by facility.

• Lack of sufficient security coverage in vulnerable areas. Parking garages, medical office buildings, and regional facilities are often areas with limited visibility and resources to maintain awareness of threats. Nationally, parking lots and garages are the third-most-common location for assaults. When health care professionals are in these locations, a tool that allows for easy alert notification when security issues arise is a must.

How are you working to address these challenges? Can you highlight your new partnership?

CriticalArc partnered with Gozio Health to enable health care staff to call for emergency help or routine assistance in any location using their smartphone or a dedicated wearable alarm.

By building SafeZone®, our unified safety, security and emergency management solution on top of Gozio’s location-based services platform, hospital security dispatchers can pinpoint the precise location of any person calling for help as well as the locations of the nearest responders. With this technology, response time is typically 50% faster.

SafeZone allows for visibility indoors, outdoors, and at remote care locations, including home care. It provides enterprise visibility to security dispatchers as well as responders in the field. When a staff member places a call for help, SafeZone targets the specific location of the threat and coordinates a response by the closest resources.  

By adding CriticalArc’s safety solution to Gozio’s indoor positioning infrastructure, hospitals and health systems can confidently prioritize staff safety and more efficiently respond to workplace violence incidents. Increasing health care worker safety improves employee satisfaction and reduces turnover—factors that ultimately enhance patient outcomes.

Do you have any interesting stories or experiences that you would like to share regarding the security in health systems? What were the learning opportunities?

Unfortunately, there are scores of stories regarding workplace violence at hospitals around the country. 

One of the most striking statistics is that patients and visitors account for 85% of all workplace violence against health care staff, according to the IAHSS 2020 Healthcare Crime Survey. In fact, patients and visitors are more likely to commit assault against health care staff than these employees’ coworkers, domestic partners, or third-party criminals.

By providing safety everywhere—on campus, in buildings, parking areas, community clinics, and even during home health visits—hospital leaders can transform their organization’s ability to protect the safety of their staff. Combining a safety solution like SafeZone with a location-based services platform like Gozio’s is a great place to start.

What tips do you have for executives of health systems looking to improve overall safety within their organizations?

If your staff feel unsafe, now is the time to act. Their feelings should serve as a catalyst to search for the right workplace safety solution—one that covers not just the entire environment of care, but also parking garages and remote facilities.

Don’t assume that everyone feels safe. With the rise in workplace violence in health care, sometimes staff can come to accept the frequency of which these events occur as “part of the job.” Take the time to query your staff and gauge their level of confidence that they are able to remain safe at all times. 

If possible, eliminate siloed solutions that require integrations to work effectively. In developing SafeZone, we sought to provide a single solution that addresses alerting, response, communication, and reporting—all of which are key to the success of your hospital’s safety response system.

What else would you like to add to this conversation today?

CriticalArc is committed to continually improving the safety and security response at health systems globally. We continue to hear feedback from our prospects like, “We did not know it would be possible to have access to a platform like this for an end-to-end solution to our gaps in safety and security.” We truly are handling this challenge in a way that no one else does today.  We are defining this space. By seeking ways to incorporate wayfinding services through our partnership with Gozio, and by applying the feedback we receive from health system clients, we will continue to enhance our approach to keeping health care staff safe.

About Mr Farrant

Glenn Farrant is the founder and CEO, CriticalArc, which specializes in transforming incident response using smartphones and innovative, cloud-based solutions. He is a former Navy weapons engineer and former manager of Maritime Command IT. Most recently, he led security systems development for Honeywell, including software products for some of the highest-profile and highest-security sites in the world. He is an engineer at heart, and is passionate about technology and the opportunities that technology provides to change how the world works.