29 October, 2007   Great Plains Regional Medical Center installs FullSight 3MP intelligent analog solution

As Great Plains Regional Medical Center in North Platte, Neb., has tripled in size over the last 20 years, improved electronic devices have kept the security guard detail at its current level. “Jeff and I have both been here 22 years, and it has probably doubled or tripled in that time frame,” says Tom Didier, Great Plains’ director of engineering services, about Jeff Whalen, biomed supervisor, and the growth of the medical center. One or two security guards are on duty 24/7 depending on the time of day, and increased electronic security such as video cameras and access control devices have made the difference. “It has allowed us not to have to increase the security staff as the hospital has grown in size,” Didier insists. “We’re getting offsite locations, but we’re still able to control what we need to watch, so we haven’t had to expand the number of guards.”

The latest upgrade to the hospital’s five-year-old security camera system is installation of eleven 360-degree cameras to watch primarily public areas inside and outside the medical center. “The ability to see an entire room, especially out in our atrium area, made it very advantageous,” Didier emphasizes. “It continued to enhance the whole system and give our guards an opportunity to really use the cameras as a security tool, because the clarity was there. That made a big difference. “We really didn’t have a lot of our main entrances covered with cameras when we did that project,” Whalen says of the five-year-old surveillance camera installation. “The way those entrances were facing right to the west and the sun going down, there really wasn’t any shade there, so they aimed right at the sun every day. Over those years, they got to where they weren’t very good and weren’t the highest quality of cameras, even back then five years ago.”

Read the full article from the SDM Magazine here:



SDM Magazine, by Russ Gager

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