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IXP220 for protection of medical facilities

“Today’s medical facilities are characterised by restricted areas, wards, offices and a host of doors as well as the constant movement of employees and patients. Just controlling the doors and medicine cabinets, let alone the hundreds (if not thousands) of employees who have different duties in different areas with different hours of work, is a major headache for management,” says Ingo Mutinelli, national sales manager for Elvey Security Technologies. “This is exacerbated by ongoing incidents and attacks on personnel such as happened at a hospital in Mpumalanga in 2011, when a patient stabbed Dr Senzosenkosi Mkhize in the chest and then a security guard who tried to intervene. There is an urgent and growing need to safeguard medical facilities as well as to restrict access to medicine storage cupboards and carts, computers, medical records, ambulances and even parking lots.”

The answer to this complex security challenge, believes Mutinelli, lies in the new Impro IXP220, which is designed to track, in real-time, the movements of tag holders. The largest of its three models can control up to 256 anti pass-back door systems as well as accommodate up to 10 000 tags and 100 000 buffered transactions per controller.

Among the IXP220’s features is its Tracker application. Explains Mutinelli: “When a tag holder, either a patient or a hospital employee, accesses a monitored location, a pop-up message will appear on the computer notifying of the event. The same will happen in the event that a tracked tag holder accesses any location.”

The Tracker feature, which runs in the PC’s system tray and is controlled by an operator username and password, can monitor up to 10 tag holders per site. Another important feature of the IXP220 is the Archive utility. “Typically the access, status and alarm transactions take up the most space in the database,” says Mutinelli. “Large databases can slow the entire system down because reports have to filter through all the transactions just to obtain the required data. The Archive utility moves unused transactions to a blank database for archival purposes, thereby speeding up the system.”

Second generation intelligence

The iTI and iTRT models boast second generation intelligence, supporting full, off-line validation and using onboard memory which allows the door controllers to store information on tag holders.

Door Mode Patterns, Access Groups and Tag Expiry Data add an additional tier of redundancy to the robust system. The onboard memory allows for 10 000 buffered transactions per fixed address, ensuring that the system’s data capturing integrity is maintained even while offline.

The Base Application allows for the configuration of User Data Protocol (UDP) output directly from controllers.

E-mail enrolment

Another feature of the IXP220 is that tag holders can be enrolled on the system via e-mail. An additional security proviso is that the feature has to be enabled and assigned a password before a tag holder enrolment form can be requested from the base application via e-mail. Once the form has been completed, a response e-mail is generated and sent to the base application. The conditions on the form will allow for the creation of either a new tag holder without a tag, or a tag holder with a personal access code.

Real-time reporting

The feature-rich IXP220 also offers real-time reporting. Reports can be requested from the base application via e-mail, which will in turn send a response e-mail with the requested reports in PDF format.

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