The Security of Medicine
Illinois medical center relies on new server solution to secure all facilities
- By Ralph C. Jensen
- Dec 01, 2019
For more than a century,
SwedishAmerican Health
System, its hospital and
medical facilities, have been
serving the community of
Rockford, IL. As a division of the University
of Wisconsin Health, the medical
staff has been delivering high-quality
healthcare and strategies to keep patients
and families healthy.
Behind the Scenes
What families and patients don’t see is
the world-class security systems that have
been put in place at all Swedish American
medical facilities and outlying satellite
healthcare clinics.
“In an ongoing effort to provide security
at the highest level, SwedishAmerican is
upgrading all their servers to include Windows
10,” said Randy Lapp, a regional
business development manager at Salient
Systems. “The security team has nearly
completed the replacement of old DVRs
with new enterprise network servers. This
offers a much more reliable security solution
tying all the medical facilities together.
Each clinic will have a single server,
while there will be multiple servers in the
hospital. Server types and camera counts
will depend upon the needs of each wing
of the facility.”
In keeping with SwedishAmerican’s
mission to deliver excellence in healthcare,
they also maintain the highest level of care
when it comes to keeping their patients,
medical staff, and facilities safe. One such
effort is the migration from Windows 7
platform to Windows 10 and maintaining
compliance in their OS. Utilizing Salient’s
CompleteView VMS with Dynamic Resolution
Scaling, the security team has more
than adequate bandwidth to record and
store video for 90 days at each facility.
What to Record
Because the medical center offers a daycare
facility, recording is ongoing, and is
stored for 90 days; however, some recordings
are held for as long as six months. In
locations where there are privacy issues,
such as patient treatment areas, no video
recordings are made. Still, in spaces such
as parking lots and common areas, video
recording is essential.
The servers replace an obsolete system
and have been engineered by Salient System
network engineers to accept upgrades
in security solutions as technology, and
various solutions evolve. Even more important
is the fact that the servers are tailormade
to fit the specific needs of the various
hospital departments and separate clinics.
The servers, just like the hospital, have
evolved over the years. The PowerProtect
platforms extend the limits of operational
capabilities for video surveillance
systems engineered for continuous access
and durability.
“The reason for the custom build is
to fulfill several missions of the hospital
system,” Lapp said. “There are various
requirements for storage and differing requirements
for recording frames per second.
The customized nature of these security
solutions fulfills the unique needs of
the customer.”
SwedishAmerican Hospital has video
recording requirements that weren’t necessary
a few years ago. Terry W. Gagliano,
security manager at the hospital system,
said the investment in this server solution
would not only help with the upgrade to
Windows 10, but it will allow greater recording
capacity.
“This is an inner-city hospital system,
where there are different and sometimes
difficult challenges,” Gagliano said. “The
clinics also are within the inner city, and
we wanted to ensure that we had enough
bandwidth to not only record, but to store
the images that we are getting. We wanted
to be able to effectively record and store
video for 90 days.”
Recording and storage specifications
vary at the hospital. For instance, at the
child daycare center at the hospital, recording
is active only during hours of operation,
and storage of those images last from
three to six months. Parking lots also are
under constant surveillance, and storage on
the servers is ongoing.
“We’re thrilled to have these server platforms
in place and working,” Gagliano
said. “What we had been using is obsolete.
The PowerProtect solutions are engineered
to accept upgrades as they are needed and
as they become available. We expect these
servers to last beyond five years before we
have to consider replacement.”
The servers or hybrid NVRs are a valueoriented
digital video surveillance system,
offering continuous operation with advanced
components. They are rack-mounted,
and as any end-user would expect,
delivers reliability and a processing power
required by mission-critical video surveillance.
Because the storage of video images
is important, SwedishAmerican sought a
single Intel Xeon processor with 16 GB of
memory, which also offered the hospital
system up to 48 TB of video storage.
“We were looking for new servers at
our existing buildings, so that meant we
were in the market for 40 to 45 servers,”
Gagliano said. “Our clinics have varied
and different missions, so demand for
security services are different. When we
sought customized solutions, we found exactly
what we needed.”
PowerPlus is a two-unit NVR rack
mount used for the installation because
SwedishAmerican sought a balance between
processing power, storage capacity,
and redundancy for high performance in
a flexible platform for its existing video
surveillance applications. A hospital setting
is a 24/7/365 environment, requiring
a system that can withstand the rigors of
continuous operation. That’s where the
enhanced performance of CompleteView
20/20 comes in.
“When we started the process of replacing
our servers and NVRs, we considered
performance first and foremost,” Gagliano
said. “It was mission-critical to have flexibility,
and it was important to honor the
standard of excellence already offered by
SwedishAmerican Hospital.”
In recent years, SwedishAmerican has
been honored in the medical professional
for its commitment to quality, and it has
become a gold standard for medical care
of any other healthcare system in northern
Illinois. The hospital has received
a Top 100 Hospital Quality Award,
150 Top Places to Work in Healthcare,
and a Distinguished Hospital Award by
J.D. Power and Associates, among many
other accolades.
While there may not be an award or
designation for security in the workplace,
SwedishAmerican has done its best to ensure
that patients are afforded the highest
level of safety and security.
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2019 issue of Security Today.