Assa Abloy Secures Danish Health Facility with Wireless Access Control

Assa Abloy’s Smartair wireless access control system is being used at a Danish health facility to keep sensitive areas under control. The system requires no physical keys, making it more secure and easier to manage.

The Danish mental health facility Syrenparken must store medicines and psychotropic drugs for the patients treated there. It is critical only trusted personnel gain access to these sensitive locations.

As part of a modernization program in the clinic, it was decided to upgrade on-site access control. One key aim was to replace old-fashioned keys, which can easily be lost, increasing the risk they fall into the wrong hands. Managers also wanted to make a working day more efficient for their trusted employees. They were each carrying three or four keys just to perform daily tasks in multiple areas of the site.

Wireless access solution for more flexibility
Syrenparken installed the Smartair wireless access control system from Assa Abloy to meet all their security needs. To date, 143 Smartair wireless locking devices are fitted on resident bedrooms, as well as doors to offices, the medicine room and storage for patient records, plus other confidential areas. Staff and residents open doors with a standard, programmable Mifare credential.

System reliability was a key factor in their choice of Smartair, according to Henrik Jürs, Head of Syrenparken: "It is possible to put our access control system on a virtual server. Should a computer go down, we can put a new computer on and then we have access to it again. We trust the data security.”

Another important parameter was flexibility in system management: Smartair makes it easy to administrate who should have access to which areas, and when. Instead of a bundle of keys, each employee has a key-card encoded with access rights to the exact areas they need. With the wireless system, it is easy to combine online and offline access management within the same installation.

At Syrenparken, 133 offline Smartair escutcheons and 3 updaters, plus 8 offline Smartair cabinet locks, work side-by-side within the same system as 10 Smartair online escutcheons. If a key-card is lost, it can be easily disabled and a new one can be activated.

Because managers no longer need to call a locksmith to replace a compromised escutcheon, Smartair is also a cost-effective solution for the health facility.
The Smartair deployment at Syrenparken is ongoing and currently projected to reach a total of up to 200 doors.