The Challenging Financial Landscape in Healthcare: Maximizing Security Efficiency

Understanding the Financial Pressures in Healthcare

Healthcare organizations today face one of the most challenging financial landscapes in decades. Rising care costs, increased demand for services, and chronic staffing shortages collide with declining reimbursements from insurers and government programs. Additionally, we see recurring news of layoffs, hiring freezes, and restructuring across health systems nationwide. It’s clear that every department, from clinical care to facilities and security, is being asked to do more with less.

These pressures directly impact operational performance. Security, often viewed as a support function, is not immune to this strain. Leaders in security and facilities are being asked to stretch thin budgets, cover broader areas with fewer staff, and still deliver a safe, compliant, and supportive environment of care. The pressing question is: how do we maximize efficiency without compromising safety or the patient experience?

The answer lies in leveraging existing security technology platforms. By transforming these standalone systems into integrated, intelligence-driven assets, we can provide value beyond security to cross-functional frontline teams. In these difficult financial times, the decision to prioritize budget resources for the right platform technology will define an organization's culture of safety—whether it leads to extinction or acceleration.

Low-Hanging Fruit: Underutilized Technology

Across the healthcare sector, facilities have invested millions of dollars in cameras, access control systems, intrusion alarms, radio communications, mass notification, and visitor management platforms. However, much of this technology remains underutilized within the ecosystem and the Internet of Things. Systems often operate in silos, generating alerts, logs, and data streams that require separate oversight. This fragmentation burdens staff, creates inefficiencies, and increases costs while limiting the real value these systems can deliver.

The first step is to stabilize, optimize, and maximize the technology investments already made. The basic foundation consists of integrating access control, video surveillance, and intrusion detection into a networked or unified platform. This integration can drive efficiencies across multiple departments, extending all the way to patient care—not just security. By enabling communication across multiple systems simultaneously, we can provide richer data, metrics, and situational awareness to leaders and frontline personnel.

Practical Examples of Integration

Let’s explore some tangible examples of how even basic integrations can create measurable efficiency and operational resilience:

Access Control + Video Surveillance + Restricted Areas

Imagine a door forced or held open in the inpatient unit automatically pulling up the nearest camera feed for staff verification. This same principle applies to IT infrastructure, engineering equipment, and other sensitive areas. Instead of sending a guard to investigate every alert or allowing alerts to go unnoticed, dispatchers can triage in real-time. This approach reduces unnecessary patrols and focuses manpower where it's needed most. Technology can serve as a force multiplier.

Intrusion + Pharmacy Operations

Access to specific pharmacy storage or after-hours access can automatically generate a video bookmark and send alerts to both security and pharmacy management when a door is forced or held open. This dual visibility reduces the risk of diversion and ensures compliance with controlled substance handling protocols.

Operating Room Efficiency

Integrating access control with operating room scheduling can confirm that only authorized staff and patients enter surgical suites. Real-time verification reduces delays, prevents contamination risks, and supports compliance with accreditation requirements.

Facilities and Maintenance

Intrusion alarms tied to environmental sensors can alert facilities teams about malfunctioning refrigerators, HVAC units, or temperature irregularities in sensitive storage areas. This ensures equipment uptime and regulatory compliance.

Each of these examples illustrates how a system originally purchased for security can expand its impact into clinical, operational, and compliance domains.

The AI Advantage: Turning Data into Intelligence

Integration is just the beginning. The next layer of efficiency comes from applying artificial intelligence (AI) and rule-based automation to the vast amounts of data captured by security systems.

Workplace Violence and Crime Prevention

AI-enabled sound detection and video analytics can identify aggressive behavior, crowding at nurse stations, or individuals fighting or loitering in restricted zones. Today’s technology proactively detects early warning behaviors before situations escalate into violence or crime. Wearable panic buttons pinpoint exactly where staff need help in the moment of need as they move throughout the facility. Rehab departments and mental health units can benefit from various early notification methods for potential concerns, activating responders automatically.

Patient and Staff Safety

Improving patient care at the bedside and clinic is now possible! Slip, trip, and fall detection algorithms can alert nurses or facilities staff instantly when a patient, staff member, or visitor experiences a fall. Inpatient video and audio remote monitoring can be achieved with microphones, cameras, and displays to enable real-time visual communication with the healthcare team. This improves response times, reduces liability, and enhances patient experience and outcomes. These hardware components leverage and interface with existing medical infrastructure, even though they are provided, installed, and supported by the security integrator. The clinical IT team supports configuration, operational deployment, and integration into clinical workflows and electronic health record systems, such as Epic.

Business Metrics and Operations

Parking lot cameras, coupled with license plate recognition, can flag known vehicles, track usage trends, and support revenue optimization. In the mailroom, package flow can be monitored to improve delivery efficiency. People counting and line queuing analytics allow for automatic alerts for registration management, creating opportunities to dispatch support staff and evaluate operations for continuous improvement. Rehab departments and mental health units can benefit from AI that identifies unusual after-hours activity, providing administrators with actionable insights into staffing and safety needs.

Compliance and Regulatory

Healthcare is governed by multiple authorities, including local AHJs, the Department of Health, Board of Pharmacies, Medicaid, Hospital Associations, and other regulatory bodies. The speed at which raw data can be turned into actionable intelligence complements the reach of limited staff, enabling teams to cover more ground with fewer resources—all while improving safety and operational performance.

Security as Safety Technology

It’s time to shift the perception of “security technology.” In reality, this technology is safety technology that benefits every department in a healthcare organization. Security is not a siloed function; it’s an enabler of operational resilience across the enterprise.

Early Warning and Notifications

Unified platforms can generate alerts for attempted break-ins, malfunctioning equipment, risky behaviors, or even fire risks. With proper workflows, notifications are sent directly to the right stakeholders—clinical staff, facilities, pharmacy, or administration—ensuring timely responses.

Enterprise-Wide Value

From inpatient wings to mental health facilities, parking garages to administrative offices, integrated and intelligent security systems provide a 360-degree layer of safety. This visibility expedites response times, strengthens compliance, and ultimately improves patient care.

Resource Multiplier

Every dollar invested in a camera or card reader can be multiplied when those devices interface together and feed into broader business metrics. This transformation shifts the narrative from “cost center” to “value creator.”

Conclusion: Time to Create Intelligence Out of Investment

Healthcare leaders cannot control the larger financial realities of rising costs and reduced reimbursements. However, they can control how efficiently their organizations operate across service lines. Security technology—when integrated, enhanced with AI, and applied across departments—becomes a force multiplier, risk reducer, and efficiency accelerator.

It is time for hospitals and health system leaders to stop viewing their security platforms as static, single-purpose tools. Instead, they should collaborate with cross-functional teams and recognize them as organizational intelligence engines capable of driving safety, efficiency, and operational excellence across the enterprise.

Every integration, every alert, and every AI-driven rule brings more value out of the investments already present in hospitals today. In a world where layoffs, limited budgets, and workforce reductions are the new normal, maximizing efficiency isn’t just a goal—it’s a long-term cost reduction survival strategy.

Optimizing security platforms and layering specialized technology to create value directly supports the mission of healthcare: improved patient care. By transforming underutilized technology into an enterprise-wide asset, organizations can safeguard people, enhance operations, and ensure resilience in the face of financial adversity. Connect with us, and let's have a conversation about how we can help prioritize, optimize, enhance, and evolve your platforms during these challenging times.

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Dylan Hayes is a 25-year physical security technology expert and previously acted as the physical security program leader for Seattle Children’s Hospital and Research Institute. He managed teams, operations, and technology that transformed the culture of safety and experience for staff, visitors, and patients. Today, he is the Healthcare Specialist for Security Solutions NW, a 120-year-old Washington-based security and fire life-safety integrator partner. He is passionate about delivering healthcare efficiencies and better outcomes for safety, security, and workplace violence prevention.