healthcare HealthEast Care System CASE STUDY HealthEast Leverages OnGuard Open Platform to Manage Enterprise-Wide Security Operations As the largest health care provider in the Twin Cities East Metro area, HealthEast Care System is dedicated to providing its patients with the highest quality medical services. From prevention to cure, HealthEast meets the needs of the Minnesota community it serves with a blend of traditional medicine and integrative therapies. Critical to meeting these needs is creating a safe and secure health care environment for its patients and staff. Lenel s OnGuard platform is providing HealthEast with a comprehensive solution to effectively manage its security operations across three acute care hospitals, a long-term care facility, and 13 primary and specialty care clinics. From access control to video, identity credentialing to visitor management, OnGuard enables HealthEast to take control over all of its security needs enterprise wide. When I came here almost three years ago, the security system that was being used was very old, outdated, not well maintained, and needed some pretty major updates, said Mark Johnson, security director for HealthEast. We needed a modern state-of-the-art system to match our new state-of-the-art ER at St. Joseph s Hospital, located in the downtown St. Paul area. To test the value and performance of Lenel s OnGuard security platform, HealthEast conducted a pilot of the system We did a test of OnGuard in a brand new ER environment that was security sensitive, with a potentially high-risk population coming into the ER, and Lenel passed with flying colors.
2 CASE STUDY : HealthEast Care System need be, and lock down and open at a moment s notice, said Johnson. One of the first large projects for us besides the ER at St. Joseph s Hospital was converting our Bethesda campus to a 100 percent Lenel access control facility to help give us that important capability. Johnson also found that OnGuard was more user intuitive than the Sofware House product HealthEast had been using and had a lot more functionality. There s a lot more integration that we re looking to do with our fire and elevator systems, including Active Directory for security and integration into our HRIS database, Johnson said. We see OnGuard as not just a security platform, but a system platform that we can all work off of. Open Platform, Open Future at St. Joseph s Hospital, which boasted a newly re-designed emergency department with 23 new rooms: six for resuscitation, 14 universal examination rooms and three for triage or minor treatments. The racetrack design of the new ER served as an optimized space for patients and their families, as well as for the care providers. But, it also had some security challenges that required a robust and versatile system platform, according to Johnson. We did a test of OnGuard in a brand new ER environment that was security sensitive, with a potentially high-risk population coming into the ER, and Lenel passed with flying colors he said. We trialed the system for nearly a year and after that the decision was made that any new and future installations will be on the Lenel platform. System-wide integration of OnGuard is occurring across the enterprise switching all Health East hospitals and clinics to the Lenel security platform. We needed to be able to control our facilities remotely, if Throughout its hospitals, clinics and outpatient services, HealthEast is dedicated to offering new technologies and is focused on the future to better serve the community. When it comes to security, OnGuard s open architecture design allows HealthEast to take advantage of the newest and best-of-breed hardware and software technologies, giving the health care provider the freedom to integrate cutting-edge third party products into their OnGuard systems. OnGuard is open and not a proprietary system, which is very important to us, Johnson said. For instance, our own IT folks can dig into some of the SQL server databases and help out on that side. HealthEast required a reliable and efficient total security platform to minimize costs and integrate the solution into its existing infrastructure. By leveraging current and future technology investments, OnGuard s open architecture design has opened the door of possibilities for the not-for-profit organization s security enterprise. At St. Joseph s Hospital, we re replacing nearly a dozen elevators. We re addressing not just security issues, but having the Lenel platform solve other problems within our
3 CASE STUDY : HealthEast Care System facility, which is also a huge cost savings, said Johnson. With OnGuard, the possibilities are endless for HealthEast to integrate human resource databases, fire and intrusion detection systems, identity solutions, elevator systems, and logical access control systems. All of these system interfaces are seamlessly integrated together utilizing a single database server and a single user interface for all applications. We are looking at integrating the fire system in through Lenel, so our stationed officer, who monitors those alarms, can respond to a life safety event fire alarm or smoke detector, said Johnson. With a full implementation, we will be going into the Active Directory account system and the HRIS databases. We re also looking at moving in the elevator module, as well as ID credentialing. OnGuard VideoManager OnGuard gives HealthEast a wide range of choices for implementing advanced video solutions. OnGuard VideoManager provides their hospitals and clinics with complete control over all video operations within a seamlessly integrated system. St Joseph s Hospital has switched about 40 percent of its access control to OnGuard and a third of its video operations, with more to follow. So far, a total of 245 cameras have been converted to the OnGuard system within HealthEast. Combined with Lenel or third-party cameras, OnGuard ensures that HealthEast has unlimited possibilities for designing hardware and software video solutions with total integration to meet the unique security needs of individual hospitals and clinics in its care system. The benefit is right there in cost savings. It s also the flexibility and choice when it comes to third-party hardware integration, said Johnson. If I want brand A camera, I can integrate brand A camera. If I want brand B camera, I can integrate brand B camera. Everyone can determine what is We re addressing not just the security issues, but having the Lenel platform solve other problems within our facility, which is also a huge cost savings.
4 CASE STUDY : HealthEast Care System Secure & Reliable Among its recent achievements, HealthEast became the first Twin Cities hospital system to receive Level III trauma designation at all of its full service, acute care hospitals: St. John s Hospital, St. Joseph s Hospital and Woodwinds Health Campus. This prestigious designation culminated a process to become part of Minnesota s statewide trauma system. As a result, HealthEast s hospitals are receiving facilities for any FEMA, HHS or natural disaster events in the area. Reliability and continuity of operation was also an important factor in HealthEast selecting the OnGuard solution from Lenel. In the health care environment, a security system that fails even for a few minutes due to downtime can have disastrous consequences. best for their facility. That is what Lenel brings to the table versus a lot of other manufacturers that pigeon hole you into a certain brand that you must use, whether that is an NVR, card reader or camera system. Integration with alarm monitoring, access control and other systems, enable HealthEast security personnel to implement video auditing capabilities, track suspicious behavior, and automate response processes to safety events. OnGuard provides the organization with a single application to monitor all forms of business, building, asset, and security alarm and event activity. Facilities management now has access to all of our outdoor cameras so when it snows they can pull up on their ipad or iphone and see what area needs to be shoveled versus running around an eight-square-block campus to figure out what areas are most severely impacted by the snow and ice, said Johnson. Our nursing staff also use the OnGuard system to see who is out in the waiting rooms and housekeeping uses it to keep the areas clean. It s not just for security, but for the entire Health East care system, he said. With fault tolerant servers, all of HealthEast s critical server components have backups. In the event that a component fails the backups kick-in real time avoiding system shutdown. In addition, multiple servers in a separate off-site HealthEast data center serve as backup systems for disaster recovery. We are moving this to a virtual server, which will give us more flexibility in a disaster recovery scenario, said Johnson. Using Lenel in a virtual environment gives us that flexibility to work at anytime, anywhere, any place. HIPAA privacy rules provide federal protections for personal health information and give patients an array of rights with respect to that information. These rules specify a series of administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to assure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronic protected health information. Given the importance of HIPAA compliance for HealthEast, it was vital that OnGuard provide a significant measure of security. We have a dedicated group of security folks here and they ran a security sweep on the Lenel server versus Software
5 CASE STUDY : HealthEast Care System House, said Johnson. What they found was that OnGuard scored much better. IT tells me it is a major relief to have OnGuard servers one less thing they have to worry about for either security or hardware network issues. HealthEast s IT department is installing Lenel access control and video cameras at their off-site data center as part of compliance with HIPAA. OnGuard is a full suite of devices, inputs, programs, and fixes that we can use for all of our facilities, said Johnson. More and more these days we are having issues with HIPAA and patient privacy and getting into different records, and Lenel is a huge benefit for securing our patients and their information.
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