Written by Holly Gilbert Stowell for Security Management
Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) was named the number one hospital in the United States by U.S. News and World Report in 2015. Along with its prestigious reputation, the healthcare network has a 17-acre urban campus and several satellite facilities around the Boston area. Therefore, the security challenges are enormous at MGH, says Bonnie Michelman, CPP, MGH director of police, security, and outside services, and past president of ASIS International.
Given the trove of assets MGH has to protect, and the high number of service calls to respond to, the security team has deployed a wide range of surveillance technologies to cover all its locations. The hospital network has upwards of 1,000 cameras from different vendors at its main campus, and 13,000 cameras overall.
In 2013, MGH began looking at ways to upgrade its video surveillance functionality, especially for more effective video recording and management. After looking at several systems, the organization decided on Milestone’s XP Protect VMS Platform, which allows staff to review, store, and manage video. Soon after, in 2014, MGH embedded the Milestone system with software from BriefCam, which brings an efficiency and added granularity to the review process.
Bob Leahy, CPP, PSP, senior manager, systems and technology at MGH police, security, and outside services, notes the installation of the Milestone system took place over a three-year period and was applied to about 1,000 cameras in its system. The upgrade was completed in March of this year. “We have a number of off-campus sites, so we started with a smaller site first, and then we sort of got our feet wet with the new system and then continued to add to that,” he says.
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