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Creating a Visitor Management System & Patient System That Work Together

Hospitals and clinics are places where everyone deserves to feel safe — staff, patients, employees, contractors, and others. Part of that security comes from having a strong and robust visitor management system that allows you to understand and control everyone coming into the facility.

doctor and nurse smiling at little girl in hospital bed

Traditional access management poses several issues for hospitals and clinics:

  • Reliance on paper processes introduces delays and human errors
  • Manual checks across different areas are uncoordinated
  • Access levels for various areas of the facility are not consistent
  • Centralization between visitor and patient management is non-existent
  • Audits of past activity to identify weak points is difficult
  • Liability and compliance management can be piecemeal

Introducing an Automated Visitor Management System

Automated visitor management solves many of these problems for hospitals, clinics and other medical settings. A combination of identity and access management with the addition of a badging and credentialing system will immediately help to secure your facility. This can mean:

  • A centralized, consistent way to capture the reasons for a hospital visit
  • Automated credentialing that gives a visitor the needed permissions to access relevant areas
  • Bespoke rules and requirements for access to certain parts of your medical facilities
  • Data capture and analysis that allows for review and refinement of your visitor system
  • Stronger compliance with guidelines
  • A safer environment for everyone at your clinic or hospital
  • A more seamless experience for staff and visitors

An automated system also frees up your non-security staff from needing to constantly check on a visitor's status. Instead, it lets them focus on providing excellent patient care.

Integrating Visitor Management With Patient Management

Visitor access management by itself is already a powerful way to boost security, but integrating it with other systems introduces even more safety and control. Linking your visitor management with your electronic health records (EHRs) and your physical access control system (PACS) creates a more powerful way to analyze and interpret visitor data.

Linking visitors to specific patients and identifying patterns in visitor behavior gives you a more proactive way to manage security:

  • Get a record of entries, exits, checkpoints, and other data related to a particular patient
  • Understand patterns in visitor behavior, for example, the dates and times they normally visit
  • Identify anomalous or unusual visits or attempts to access restricted areas
  • Use machine learning to identify trends in general or activity related to specific areas

This combination will help you to heighten accountability and reinforce safety standards across your medical facility.

Additional Benefits Provided by Hospital Visitor Management Systems

It's worth digging a little deeper on how integrating a visitor management system can improve your daily operations. Benefits include:

  • The front-desk staff at your healthcare facility have a consistent, comprehensive way to provide badges and credentials
  • Real-time monitoring and security intelligence reports allow for the early identification of potential threats
  • Compliance with HIPPA, Mars-e, GDPR, and ISO27001 guidelines and standards is simpler and easier to maintain
  • Potential tailgating, piggybacking, or using expired badges to attempt to gain access can be identified

How HID SAFE Can Help

HID SAFE for Healthcare is a world-class security system designed to integrate with your existing healthcare operations and systems to provide seamless identity, access and other management.

HID SAFE can integrate with:

  • HL7 compliant interfaces
  • Electronic Health Records systems
  • Health Information systems, such as Epic and Cerner
  • Human Resources systems
  • More than 50 physical access systems, multiple biometrics systems, background checking services, and more

HID SAFE helps hospitals and healthcare organizations to:

  • Simplify, enforce and streamline conditional workplace access policies
  • Automate the management of all access control identities
  • Ensure that the right people have appropriate access at the right time

Another aspect of HID SAFE, Risk Analytics, reviews logs for each device and system and, through the use of machine learning, transforms this data into critical knowledge and actionable insights.

Ready to see how HID SAFE can help your healthcare organization? Request a demo.

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Janette Andler is Director of Vertical Market Development in IAM Solutions. In this role, she works with healthcare organizations across North America to help solve their physical identity and access management challenges. Based in Dallas, Janette has been a member of the security industry for over 12 years.