San Juan Capistrano, CA, July 11, 2012—IQinVision, market leader in high-performance HD megapixel IP cameras, today announced The Nebraska Medical Center, located in Omaha, has deployed nearly 300 IQeye HD megapixel cameras to ensure patient safety, upgrade medical care, and reduce staffing costs.
When The Nebraska Medical Center wanted to streamline its operations and improve care for at-risk patients, IQinVision HD megapixel cameras and Milestone XProtect video management software proved to be the answer. With nearly 5,000 employees and 1,000 physicians, The Nebraska Medical Center is the largest health-care facility in Nebraska. The hospital hosts 624 beds and numerous departments that cover pediatrics to oncology to bio-containment.
With a number of patients who require 24/7 observation, the medical center wanted to improve the safety of these at-risk patients, while also reducing staff and overhead requirements. The Center worked with Sentrixx Security Solutions to deploy 299 IQinVision megapixel indoor day/night vandal IP domes and infrared units, and monitoring stations running Milestone XProtect Enterprise IP video surveillance software.
Nebraska Medical Center has reduced its overhead by eliminating the majority of its one-on-one bedside observation staff. There are a dozen monitoring stations located throughout the center and each station allows one or two technicians to observe multiple patients simultaneously. In just the first two months of being operational, the megapixel video system has streamlined the process for monitoring patients and saved The Nebraska Medical Center thousands of dollars.
Until recently, when a patient required 24/7 observation, the hospital placed a staff member in the room to keep an eye on the patient. This was standard practice for patients who, for example, were on suicide watch, prone to violent outbursts or in a critical state of health. It is typical for the medical center to have two or three dozen patients being watched in a one-on-one scenario on a given day, which put a strain on staffing costs.
Sentrixx installed IQinVision megapixel indoor day/night vandal IP dome cameras, providing staff with full real-time video at 30 fps with a 720p resolution. These are unobtrusive dome-style cameras that blend into the hospital’s aesthetic, and they are vandal resistant. Along with each camera, Sentrixx installed an infrared unit to further improve night-time image resolution.
The Nebraska Medical Center can already cite a number of benefits even after the relatively short period of use. The deployment was fast and easy, and training staff for the advanced system took practically no time.
It is somewhat early to put a firm number on how much this has helped in regards to staffing and reducing the facility’s overall spending, but staff believe they have already seen significant savings, numbering in the thousands of dollars. “I haven’t seen a dollar amount since it is so early, but I know we have already saved ourselves thousands of dollars and we anticipate recouping the cost of the cameras within 7 or 8 months,” said Maureen Goltl, an operations manager at The Nebraska Medical Center.
Then, there are the people being protected—patients and staff members. “We recently had a patient who was somewhat aggressive and agitated,” recalled Goltl. “We placed a person in the room with this patient, but we also decided to keep them on the monitor so the person watching the monitor could tell when the person sitting with that patient needed help. We wanted to make sure they were both safe.”
