To resolve these problems, Yakima Memorial turned to a Verkada hybrid cloud system incorporating advanced AI across seven physical locations. Additional sites, such as the North Star Lodge Cancer Care Center and Children’s Village, also have installed the Verkada cameras.
With computer vision features in the outdoor cameras, the health system can monitor areas just outside its facilities, seeing details on vehicles such as license plates.
When MultiCare Health System completed its purchase of Yakima Memorial earlier this year, there were discussions about using the hospital’s solution across the rest of MultiCare’s large organization, according to Bob Benoit, MultiCare’s CTO and vice president of digital transformation.
“In our hospital systems, crime and patient safety have been a growing concern. Our physical security team is doing an end-to-end assessment on ways to mature and advance our best practices to make the hospitals as safe as possible for both our patients and employees,” he says. “We think technology is going to have a big role in doing this with scale and cost-effectiveness.”
In the meantime, the health system deployed Verkada in the entryway and some operating rooms at MultiCare Capital Medical Center in Olympia, Wash., Benoit says.
“We’re in a learning phase where we’re using this modern system and out-of-the-box functionality for quick and simple wins, and then we’ll start turning on more-advanced functionality over time as we learn about the system and integrate it into how we work,” Benoit says.
Some video surveillance systems integrate with other applications such as badging systems, and the applications then “learn” from each other. Such large learning models bring detection, analysis and alerting capabilities that are faster than what a human can do, Benoit says.
For example, modern video technology lets health systems respond to incidents more quickly by spotting details and allowing for quick analysis, such as tracking a person’s location based on a specific article of clothing, according to Benoit.
“You can see how using generative AI to quickly identify risks can reduce the time it takes to respond and make better use of our security staff’s time,” he says. “We think that’s a big piece of the future.”
