Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) chooses FLIR’s -Latitude VMS to monitor safety of patients and staff.
FLIR’s Latitude Video Management System (VMS) makes GOSH ready for a fully digital future.
As one of the world's leading children's hospitals, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) was faced with an outdated, legacy CCTV system, requiring an upgrade to digital IP-based cameras in a challenging and busy 24/7 environment. In order to guarantee the security and safety of patients, family and staff in the future, GOSH selected FLIR’s Latitude VMS as the centerpiece of its security monitoring strategy.
Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) is an international center of excellence in child healthcare. Together with its research partner, the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, GOSH forms the UK’s only academic Biomedical Research Center specializing in pediatrics. Since its formation in 1852, the hospital has been dedicated to children’s healthcare and to finding new and better ways to treat childhood illnesses. Great Ormond Street Hospital receives more than 268,000 patient visits every year. Most of the children are referred from other hospitals throughout the UK and overseas, to make use of any of the hospital’s 58 different clinical specialties.
Looking for greater flexibility
GOSH had a legacy CCTV system in place that was in need of a serious upgrade, but at the same time, the hospital was also interested to know where they could possibly leverage existing equipment and cabling infrastructure to reduce costs and maximize return on its existing systems. Jonathan Paradi, Mechanical Engineer and Compliance Manager at Great Ormond Street Hospital commented on the lack of flexibility and user-friendliness of the system in place at the time: “We had a number of DVRs and analog cameras hard-wired back to one location. If we had an incident, in order to find and review that video we basically could only hit rewind and our security room was frozen until we found the right footage. We wanted to upgrade to a 100% IP system for greater flexibility, the ability to review video anywhere, and to be able to track action and people throughout the hospital’s public areas. We were also in need of much better video quality. We couldn’t zoom in on incidents and the image quality could not be used for prosecution.”Another critical requirement for the new system was not only to be scalable, but also open to third-party products and disciplines in order to ensure that the hospital could integrate technology and systems, such as access control, intrusion detection, fire and building management systems directly onto the CCTV system.
Fully digital IP security video
GOSH selected Check Your Security Ltd., a Norfolk based integrator of security monitoring systems, specializing in IP security technology. Check Your Security designs, installs commissions and maintains a wide range of security systems including CCTV, access control and perimeter fencing, and has extensive expertise in working with universities and hospitals, with many installations across the east of England. Check Your Security conducted a complete audit of the GOSH CCTV system so as to ensure that informed decisions for new solutions could be made. Based on that audit, GOSH opted for a video management platform by FLIR Systems as the centerpiece of the security installation. Both IP-based and analog cameras were coupled to the system through the use of FLIR encoders, making implementation quick and easy. As such, Check Your Security upgraded GOSH towards a fully digital, IP-based video solution with over 200 cameras, 100TB storage and an extensive access control system, creating a complete integrated solution for a 24/7 live monitoring environment. The FLIR Latitude VMS was selected out of eight different technology providers. Jonathan Paradi, mechanical engineer and compliance manager at Great Ormond Street Hospital, comments: “The FLIR solution sold itself. Being the most user-friendly, it gave us the flexibility we really needed. FLIR’s Latitude allowed us to use the existing network infrastructure and a number of the analog cameras we had already invested in.”
Latitude VMS
FLIR’s Latitude VMS provides seamless forensic quality imaging and user-friendly operation consisting of dedicated, web-based and mobile client software. The system’s scalable architecture efficiently supports systems of any size or architecture for implementation throughout enterprises, across multiple sites, cities and continents. Latitude version 7.0 offers effortless viewing, playback, search and export, while maintaining scalability and usability. Latitude now manages data from more than 200 IP based HD and analog cameras, covering the entire hospital complex and monitored from a central command video wall, along with dedicated workstations throughout the hospital, and possibly in the future from portable devices (tablets or smartphones).
Ready for the future
The new system is now a fully IP based video surveillance system that allows for quick incident resolution and that is fully scalable to accommodate for future growth. Jonathan Paradi as well as the GOSH staff are quite excited about the future and the enhanced capabilities of their new security technology: “FLIR’s Latitude VMS seems much more intelligent in the way we can organize and manage the camera views for what we need. Just one demonstration of FLIR Latitude’s possibilities was a live streaming of a video feed onto an Apple iPad. Needless to say, that technology demonstration was impressive.”
“The goal for our video system is simple: provide higher patient safety,” Jonathan Paradi continues. “We had a large, temporary generator cabled into an important clinical building, and one night the cables were stolen. Luckily, this was before the generator was being actively used to back anything up, so the situation could have been worse. We had one of the old analog cameras looking at the crime scene, and we couldn’t read the license plate or identify the people. Had that been a FLIR camera on the new system, I’m confident we’d have the information we needed. We have a lot of faith in what the new system will be able to do for us.”
