Security Upgrade for Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)

“What we don’t have is tremendous amounts of labor that can spend hours – or in many cases, days – that we need to go through video. So we can take eight hours of video, and BriefCam creates the ability for somebody to go through it in less than an hour.” Bonnie Michelman CPP, MGH Director of Police, Security and Outside Services

Challenge: Increase Security and Improve Operations

Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has a 17-acre urban campus and several satellite facilities around the Boston area. With 29 contiguous and 14 separate buildings, 130 off-site facilities, 30,000 employees and 60,000 people coming through every day, it is a microcosm of the city. The security and operational challenges are enormous, and the hospital’s security dispatch centers receive 315,000 calls for service every year.

MGH deploys a wide range of surveillance technologies to cover all its locations. The hospital network has more than 1,000 video cameras at its main campus, and 13,000 cameras overall. The hospital upgraded its video surveillance system to achieve more effective video recording and management, however this failed to address the challenge of how to review and analyze hours of footage and turn the video data into actionable information.

Solution
MGH selected BriefCam for rapid review, search and analysis of the vast amount of video recorded daily at the hospital. BriefCam was integrated into the hospital’s Milestone XProtect video management software (VMS), enabling the hospital to handle security and safety in a more efficient, accurate and proactive way, directly from within the VMS.

The BriefCam Video Synopsis solution is enabling MGH to review hours of video in a matter of minutes, as well as helping address operational issues such as finding unauthorized people in restricted areas, and identifying cars driving against traffic around the hospital.

The ability to rapidly pinpoint objects by appearance such as people, vehicles, size and color, and refine the search by behavior of these objects such as direction, speed or path, has helped MGH address the wide-ranging requirements of the different profiles of users reviewing video.

Finally, MGH is planning to use BriefCam to facilitate regulatory compliance across the hospital, such as inspecting the adherence of personnel with hand washing guidelines and medical dress codes.

The Results

• Ease of Use: BriefCam is seamlessly integrated into the hospital’s Milestone VMS and is accessible at the click of a tab.
• Improved Efficiency: An hour of video is viewed in a minute, freeing hospital staff to focus on other important tasks.
• Faster Time-to-Target: An elderly man brought into MGH’s emergency room walked out of the hospital unnoticed. By the time security was notified, he was missing. Cameras covering paths of egress were selected for review using BriefCam. Within minutes, MGH security discovered that the man had walked to   a nearby metro station stop. The transit police were contacted and ensured his safe return.

• Safer and more Secure: MGH received a report of egregious behavior in the restrooms, without indication of the time of occurrence. Since there are no cameras in the restrooms, video footage from the hallway outside had to be reviewed – summing up to hours of footage. Using BriefCam, MGH security quickly searched for individuals passing through the hallway during the rough time span of the incident and were able to identify the offending individual.

• Proactive Planning: The MGH campus includes a small museum open to the public. Using BriefCam, the hospital was able to quickly quantify how many people visited the museum on any given day, enabling better planning of operational needs.

“Just through BriefCam, being able to go through it (video footage) very quickly, we were able to identify the exact time frame and the exact individual who was creating the problem.” Bonnie Michelman, CPP, MGH Director of Police, Security and Outside Services