Hospitals operate at the intersection of public access, high-risk activity and constant motion. Every day, thousands of people, from patients and visitors to medical staff and contractors, move through interconnected spaces that must remain both open and secure. Protecting that environment means hospitals must balance safety, privacy, compliance and efficiency across vast campuses and complex workflows.
Video analytics for healthcare provide the situational awareness hospitals need to achieve that balance. By adding an intelligence layer to existing surveillance systems, BriefCam, Milestone’s advanced video analytics software, transforms video into actionable insights—empowering staff to see more, understand faster and respond immediately. In this article, we’ll explore how the BriefCam platform and its comprehensive analytics capabilities help hospitals enhance safety, improve efficiency and solve healthcare-specific challenges.
Before diving into how BriefCam can support specific healthcare scenarios, it helps to understand the three modules —Review, Respond and Research—and some of the available capabilities that make up the platform.
The Review module empowers hospitals to investigate incidents quickly and confidently by turning hours of video into minutes of actionable insight. It enables staff to search footage efficiently, isolate relevant events and verify facts with precision—without manually scrubbing through countless camera feeds. With patented VIDEO SYNOPSIS® technology, advanced filtering tools and visual overlays, Review helps security and operations teams identify movement patterns, confirm details and uncover the full story behind any event. For hospitals where time and accuracy directly impact safety, Review delivers the speed and clarity needed to resolve incidents and support compliance with confidence.
Hospitals can use Synopsis in Review to see all activity at a hospital entrance in a condensed period of time, then filter by class—such as people—to isolate the most relevant details for an investigation.
The Respond module equips hospitals with the situational awareness needed to act the moment an event unfolds. By transforming live video into intelligent alerts, it helps security and operations teams detect unusual activity, manage evolving situations and respond before small issues escalate into safety incidents. Whether monitoring restricted areas, entrances or busy public spaces, Respond enables staff to stay informed through real-time notifications tailored to hospital-specific workflows. The result is faster response, better coordination and a safer environment for patients, visitors and staff.
The Research module turns video into meaningful business and operational insight that helps hospitals make smarter, data-driven decisions. By analyzing object movement, dwell time and occupancy trends, it reveals how people and vehicles interact with hospital spaces throughout the day. This visibility enables leaders to refine building layouts, staffing levels and traffic flow to create environments that are more efficient, comfortable and safe for patients and staff. Research connects everyday security video to long-term strategy, empowering hospitals to continuously improve safety, efficiency and the overall quality of care.
In Research, hospitals can access ready-made dashboards or customize their own to visualize object trends, occupancy and movement patterns for data-driven planning.
Together, these three modules form the foundation of BriefCam’s video analytics platform—working in unison to deliver comprehensive visibility across hospital environments. Each module supports a different aspect of safety and efficiency, from real-time awareness to long-term strategic insight. Next, let’s look at specific healthcare challenges and how BriefCam features can help hospitals overcome them.
Hospitals face a range of safety and operational challenges that demand constant visibility and timely response. With the right video analytics tools, these challenges become opportunities to strengthen safety, streamline operations and improve the overall care environment.
1. Reducing patient elopement
When patients leave secure areas without authorization, they put themselves and others at risk. In a hospital setting, video analytics can help detect and prevent these incidents before they escalate.
Creating a real-time alert with Line Crossing, Custom ClassifID and Face Recognition is an effective option for tracking and alerting on high-risk patients within a hospital or healthcare facility. For instance, by adding a patient’s face to a watchlist or placing at-risk patients in specific gowns, system operators can proactively track movement throughout the hospital when needed. When combined with Line Crossing, staff can be alerted in real time when specific patients cross ward boundaries or pass through doors and exits they shouldn’t.
Together, these capabilities empower hospitals to take a proactive approach to patient safety that enhances real-time response, accelerates critical searches and maintains a secure environment that protects vulnerable individuals while respecting privacy and dignity. (Face recognition can be deployed where permitted and disabled in environments that require stricter privacy compliance.)
2. Preventing infant abduction
Maternity and neonatal units require the highest levels of protection to keep newborns safe and ensure only approved personnel can enter. Creating predefined rules with Line Crossing, Custom ClassifID and Face Recognition provides healthcare security operators with real-time alerts when non-approved personnel or visitors enter a nursery or neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). For example, Custom ClassifID can be trained to recognize the specific scrub color worn by authorized medical staff, while Face Recognition can help verify approved personnel and reduce false alarms.
Hospitals can use Face recognition to filter and identify individuals across multiple cameras and create watchlists for people who should not access maternity or neonatal areas. By combining these capabilities, hospitals can maintain constant awareness in sensitive areas and ensure that only authorized individuals have access to newborns and critical care spaces.
3. Curbing drug diversion
When controlled substances are misused or accessed without authorization, it jeopardizes patient safety, staff integrity and regulatory compliance. Creating a real-time alert with Line Crossing, Area and Face Recognition is an effective way to monitor access to pharmacies or medication storage rooms. Using Area and Line Crossing, hospitals can trigger alerts when someone interacts with a medical cabinet or enters a secure storage zone. With Face Recognition, approved medical personnel can be added to a watchlist and excluded from alerts to reduce false alarms when authorized staff are present.
In Review, hospitals can use Video synopsis with line-crossing filters to see when someone enters a pharmacy area and quickly identify interactions with medication storage. By combining these capabilities, hospitals can strengthen pharmacy security, identify potential diversion events faster and maintain accountability through clear, searchable video evidence.
Hospital parking lots and garages can be prime targets for criminal activity ranging from car theft and break-ins to assault. When incidents occur in these areas, identifying suspects and understanding what happened can be time-consuming and difficult. Video analytics help hospitals improve safety, increase efficiency and support law enforcement by making video review and response faster and more accurate.
With Synopsis, staff can review hours of footage in minutes by simultaneously displaying events that occurred at different times. If a suspect remains at large, Face Recognition can be used to upload a photo or screenshot to a watchlist and trigger alerts if the individual returns. License Plate Recognition (LPR) can also identify vehicles associated with incidents, while Fast Track enables staff to follow suspects across multiple cameras to determine their movements and exit points.
In Review, hospitals can use Video synopsis and LPR results to quickly surface vehicle activity in parking garages and identify relevant vehicles during an investigation. These capabilities in the BriefCam platform help hospitals dramatically reduce investigation time, improve safety across parking facilities and create a more secure experience for staff and visitors.
While safety and security are essential to hospital operations, video analytics also deliver value far beyond incident response. The same technology that helps detect risks and prevent emergencies can also uncover insights that improve efficiency, comfort and the overall care experience.
Using the Research module, hospitals can transform video into operational intelligence to better understand how people and vehicles move through their facilities. This data reveals opportunities to reduce congestion, improve access and streamline patient flow.
For instance, with People Counting and Visual Layers, hospitals can monitor peak volumes in waiting rooms or identify common routes through entrances and corridors. Dwell time analysis highlights where patients or visitors spend the most time and can help staff adjust layouts, staffing and signage for smoother navigation and shorter wait times. In addition, Common Path analysis can even pinpoint traffic bottlenecks and inform design improvements across the campus.
The Occupancy Dashboard in the Research module shows real-time and historical occupancy trends, giving hospital staff a clear view of building usage and peak traffic periods.
By applying video analytics as a strategic tool, hospitals gain a deeper understanding of how their environments operate day to day—enabling data-driven decisions that improve efficiency, enhance safety and elevate the overall patient and visitor experience.
Hospitals are continuing to find new ways to apply video analytics beyond traditional safety and security use cases. One innovative example comes from a hospital using BriefCam to record entry and exit times for operating rooms (ORs).
Historically, when a patient entered an OR, the accompanying nurse had to pause and manually chart the entry time, repeating the process again at exit. This extra step took time away from patient care and added to the administrative workload for nursing staff. By integrating BriefCam with the hospital’s existing video surveillance infrastructure, the facility can now automatically capture OR entry and exit data without requiring nurses to step away from patients.
This creative application saves critical time, reduces procedural burden and allows for continuity of care. It also highlights how hospitals can extend the value of their video analytics investments: using technology designed for security to streamline workflows, improve staff efficiency and ultimately enhance the patient experience.
Healthcare environments demand high standards of privacy and compliance. From patient information to video data, hospitals must ensure that every layer of technology supports trust, transparency and regulatory responsibility.
BriefCam’s platform is built with a privacy-by-design approach that allows hospitals to choose how analytics are deployed and managed.
- Optional Face Recognition: Hospitals can enable or disable the feature based on policy, jurisdiction or patient privacy requirements. This flexibility of technology empowers hospitals to ensure compliance with regional regulations without limiting analytic functionality.
- Configurable data retention: Administrators can determine how long analytic metadata and video clips are stored to make sure video policies align with hospital data governance standards.
- Role-based access: Permissions can be tailored so only authorized personnel can view, manage or export analytic results so sensitive data is protected and accountability is safeguarded.
- Audit logging: Every access or configuration change is recorded to help hospitals maintain transparency and meet audit requirements for security and compliance.
These protections ensure that video analytics empower staff without compromising patient rights or institutional integrity. By combining ethical technology practices with operational flexibility, hospitals can confidently leverage AI-driven analytics to enhance care while maintaining full compliance with privacy standards.
Every hospital strives to deliver exceptional care while maintaining a safe and efficient environment. Video analytics help make that possible. By turning everyday video into actionable intelligence, BriefCam empowers healthcare teams to protect people, improve operations and enhance the patient experience while upholding the highest standards of privacy and responsibility.
From real-time awareness to long-term insight, BriefCam continues to evolve alongside the healthcare industry, enabling hospitals to see more, respond faster and care smarter.
Ready to learn how BriefCam can help your organization improve safety, efficiency and patient care? Contact us today to connect with our team or request a personalized demo.