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Improving patient safety and cutting costs

With nearly 5000 employees and 1000 physicians, The Nebraska Medical Centre is the largest health-care facility in Nebraska. The hospital hosts 624 beds and numerous departments that cover paediatrics to oncology to bio-containment. The staff is responsible for patients of all types, including some at-risk patients who need around-the-clock monitoring.

Until recently, when a patient required 24/7 observation, the hospital placed a staff member in the room to keep an eye on the patient. This was standard practice for patients who, for example, were on suicide watch, prone to violent outbursts or in a critical state of health. It is typical for the medical centre to have two or three dozen patients being watched in a one-on-one scenario on a given day, which put a strain on staffing costs.

The Nebraska Medical Centre was looking for an opportunity to improve safety for patients, while also reducing its overhead costs. In the spring of 2011, Maureen Goltl, an operations manager at The Nebraska Medical Centre, was asked to investigate video monitoring as an option.

“Our goal was to ensure patient safety and to reduce costs,” Goltl says. “We have always had a population of patients who are confused and agitated; patients who we are not comfortable left alone in their rooms. It was necessary to staff those rooms for round-the-clock observation. At a time where we needed to reduce our staffing, installing video monitoring cameras at almost every bedside was the best option and helped a great deal.”

Goltl organised a large planning team and by the fall — a mere eight months later – the system was deployed and operational.

Partnering for success

With the planning team weighing their options of possible vendors on this project, they decided to work with Sentrixx Security Solutions. In 2009, Sentrixx installed 13 high-resolution Axis IP cameras in the Adult Intensive Care Unit at The Nebraska Medical Centre. These cameras were controlled from a monitoring station running Milestone XProtect Enterprise video management software. They used this as a foundation for planning the new solution they wanted to deploy.

“We had a set of business requirements,” says Goltl. “We wanted fixed cameras. We did not want them to record. And we needed to be able to see a patient at night, in the dark.”

Sentrixx provided a turnkey solution, handling all of the installation: Dell servers, the cameras and the monitoring stations running XProtect.

Sentrixx installed 299 IQinVision megapixel indoor day/night vandal IP domed cameras. These provide full real-time video at 30 fps with a 720p resolution. These are unobtrusive dome-style cameras that blend into the hospital’s aesthetic, and they are vandal resistant. Along with each camera, Sentrixx installed an infrared unit, which was placed separately because current IP cameras with built-in infrared capabilities did not offer the high-resolution capabilities required for this deployment. Sentrixx also installed 10 servers and 12 monitoring stations, many of which consisted of Dell all-in-one systems.

To house these stations, Sentrixx brought on Kiewit Construction to build cabinets that matched the existing environment. Joe Turecek of Kiewit Construction also acted as a project manager on the overall project.

“We created a closed network that allowed each hospital unit to operate separately,” says Phil Fenton, Manager at Sentrixx Security. Each unit has a maximum of 42 cameras. Since each unit operates separately, there is no need for all the cameras to be available on a single server. Because of this, Fenton determined The Nebraska Medical Centre only required XProtect Enterprise for this deployment, which the facility was already using in other areas of the hospital. Had there been a need for all 299 cameras to be available to a single server, they would have chosen to deploy XProtect Corporate. “They already had the XProtect Enterprise licence and it was affordable to load it up on 10 servers.”

But Fenton goes on to highlight a different reason for XProtect being the right choice for this project. “What’s really important to the customer about XProtect is the simplicity of its user interface and its reliability.” Fenton explains, “Sentrixx has standardised on Milestone Systems because of these two factors.”

In the field

Sentrixx trained a core group of staff members at The Nebraska Medical Centre, including Goltl. They quickly learned how to use the software and perform troubleshooting. Those staff members, in turn, have trained more staff.

“It’s pretty easy software to figure out so we haven’t had any problems,” says Goltl. “As we have new people coming and going, they really just need to sit down for a few minutes to get training.”

The Nebraska Medical Centre now has seven units that are regularly staffed for manning the monitoring stations: two medicine telemetry units, two surgical units, the solid organs and transplant unit, the neurology unit and the cardiology unit.

There are a dozen monitoring stations, some of which are actively used on a daily basis, while some are only used when there is a need. On average they are monitoring about five to six patients per active monitoring station, for a total of 20 to 30 patients monitored at any given moment. This number fluctuates, and they can use XProtect to quickly activate and deactivate cameras as needed.

The Nebraska Medical Centre can already cite a number of benefits even after such a short period of use. The deployment was fast and easy, and training staff on XProtect software took practically no time.

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