Your Rx to Boost Access Sales
From local nursing homes to the largest research hospitals, health-care facilities continue to be a lucrative marketplace. Integrators that understand this environment’s intricacies and regulations are best positioned for success.
Smaller Facilities Can Have Big Payoffs
What follows here is a case in point of how small health-care facilities found in nearly all communities are providing service and sales opportunities for installing security contractors. We begin with an inoperative door that was the final breaking point for Anthony Aldretti, maintenance supervisor for the Colorado State Veterans Nursing Home in Walsenburg.
Aldretti called Ingersoll Rand Security Technologies Security & Safety Consultant Earl Truncer, who had visited with him in the past, discussing online and wireless access control systems.
The nursing home is a 120-bed, long-term care facility for veterans and their spouses who reside in the region and nearby states. Built in 1993 and adjacent to Spanish Peaks Hospita
l in southeastern Colorado, the nursing home provides a special care unit for Alzheimer’s and dementia residents.
According to Truncer, the facility has a series of access control challenges, which are worth reviewing here:
- The facility is an L-shaped building with the veteran’s home on one wing and the hospital on the other. Medical and staff personnel go back and forth regularly.
- The facility provides meals to the nearby prison. Prison personnel pick up the trays of food and later return the trays.
- On very cold nights, the homeless are permitted to stay within specified areas of the hospital.
- The combination hospital/nursing home has 200 employees and 20 doors that need locking.
Knowing of the facility’s present key-based system and the access control needs of the hospital/nursing home, Truncer put Aldretti in touch with Russell Bogner of Colorado State Safe & Lock in Colorado Springs. Bogner had recently installed a Web-enabled embedded system at several other Colorado locations and Truncer felt that it would provide a solution that Aldretti would like.
According to Bogner, eliminating the need for special software or a dedicated PC, such a system would let the facility’s authorized users access, monitor and manage their system from any computer running a standard Web browser. Since the system would have its own IP address, they could use any networked online computer to access and manage the access control system.
Importantly, the cost of this system was less than that of a single panel on larger security management system solutions and the system’s plug-and-play design made configuration easy. With the system, lockdown is a simple click of the mouse.
“The installation process was quick,” says Aldretti. “It only took about three days for everything in both the nursing home and the hospital. We completed the veterans’ home and then installed the system in the hospital.”
Administrators discovered the system is easy to understand. “As with other Web applications, it is simply accessed with a user name and password. Being so easy to use, we look forward to expanding the system into additional buildings at the medical center,” Aldretti says.
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