By HFT Staff

Shore Medical Center in Somers Point, New Jersey, is a 199-bed facility that employs more than 1,500 people and admits more than 12,000 patients. Its emergency room treats more than 44,000 patients annually, and its proximity to the vacation destination of Ocean City means the hospital sees an increase in demand for its services during the summer months. 

Before switching to an Axis video surveillance system, Shore Medical used a system that was a mix of analog and IP cameras from a variety of manufacturers. As a result, managing the overall system with a VMS was challenging at best. Updating to an all IP-based surveillance system has allowed Shore Medical to optimize the deployment of assets and build a modern platform that will address its current and future needs. 

Making easy work of sharing video 

When surveillance video of incidents was needed, exporting it to share with law enforcement or the hospital’s risk management team was challenging. Lawrence Phillips, the medical center’s director of security, would have to produce a DVD, which then had to be password protected, creating inefficiency and frustration for Shore Medical and law enforcement. 

This was just one of the many reasons Phillips knew it was time for an upgrade. He consulted with Fred Banner, the medical center’s vice president and chief information officer, who suggested they seek the assistance of Corepoint Networks, an Axis partner. 

Corepoint proposed a design to deliver an IP-based system that would eliminate the problems of the hospital’s mismatched video system. Administration approved the new system, which included a sufficient number of Axis cameras and a Milestone XProtect Expert VMS. The Axis/Milestone solution has significantly reduced the time and effort associated with performing the tasks of locating and sharing video. 

“In the past, I could easily spend hours preparing video of an incident, but with the Axis and Milestone system, I’ve been able to reduce that to minutes,” Phillips says. “That makes a tremendous difference to me and to the hospital because now I can move on to other things that need to be done to maintain security.” 

No more blind spots 

By using Axis multi-sensor cameras, Shore Medical was able to strategically place assets to improve coverage with a lower camera count. Rather than installing cameras at both ends of a hallway, for example, a single four-sensor model with a 360-degree field of view was deployed in the center to provide the same coverage without overlap or blind spots. 

Besides providing fuller coverage, the multi-sensor cameras reduced cabling and installation costs as well. 

Medical center officials also faced challenges with getting the camera coverage they needed outside. They chose a panoramic camera with a field of view of 180 degrees to affix to the exterior of buildings to cover critical areas, including the loading dock and parking lots. The 180-degree field of view was also perfectly suited for the parking garage where the camera’s Forensic wide dynamic range (WDR) proved valuable in dealing with the variable lighting conditions. 

Freeing up space 

“The security operations office was just filled with multiple racks of the old analog equipment,” says Bryan McGair Jr., director of sales and marketing for Corepoint Networks. “But now that we’ve upgraded to this newer solution with all the new Axis cameras and new video management software, we’ve been able to scale it down significantly so that it only takes up maybe a quarter of the rack space.” 

In fact, the upgrade allowed Corepoint to more efficiently lay out IT cabinets and reduce Shore Medical’s IT hardware by almost 75 percent while also deploying a fully redundant video system with the ability to automatically fail over to a separate data center if there is an outage. 

The combination of Axis and Milestone technology has streamlined video management and control, removing much of the frustration of the previous system by pulling all cameras into a single centralized platform. 

Next stop: Access control 

With the Axis surveillance solution in place, Shore Medical can turn its attention to updating its access control system. Officials plan to install Axis network video intercoms and access control card readers to replace the aging access systems. In addition to delivering greater remote management capabilities, the intercoms and access control units will allow Shore Medical to provide individuals with proper access privileges based on their job description and duties. The new access control system will communicate with the Milestone video management system for a complete security solution.