A recent report from the American Hospital Association draws welcome attention to a long-festering problem: the impact of violent attacks on a cornerstone of our healthcare system.
The report finds that hospitals in 2023 spent $18.27 billion to contend with a rising tide of violence both inside and outside their four walls. That includes $3.62 billion to protect workers, including violence prevention programs, training, technology, and other facility security measures.
It adds to a grim body of evidence highlighting the risks of violence that healthcare providers face. When National Nurses United surveyed its members in 2024, it found that more than four in five had experienced some type of workplace violence in the previous year.
Healthcare and social assistance workers experience the highest incidence rates of workplace violence of any industry, accounting for 73% of all related nonfatal injuries or illnesses in 2018, according to federal data. The trend has worsened even further since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hospitals face staggering financial expenses as a result of these incidents at a time when they can least afford them. The costs include legal settlements, regulatory fines, workers’ compensation, and increases in insurance premiums. Other costs, such as heightened regulatory scrutiny, accreditation risks, and the loss of public trust—confidence that theirs is a safe space for healing—are harder to quantify. Employees themselves are left to deal with things like post-traumatic stress, burnout, and diminished job satisfaction.
The question is, what should hospitals be doing to better safeguard their employees and patients from violence?
A fractured approach
Healthcare famously struggles with a lack of interoperability among its various technological systems. It is well known that different EHRs don’t communicate with one another, or with billing systems, and so forth.
Hospital security systems have many of the same problems:
- As workplace violence has worsened, hospitals have developed ad-hoc security postures, resulting in systems and infrastructure silos.
- Hospitals often manage multiple different security systems, which is costly and multiplies risk.
- With few dedicated employed security or law enforcement personnel, emergency response times are slow for those in need.
In addition, staff training for unplanned emergencies is lacking. In the National Nurses United poll, only 62.8% of respondents said their employer provided training on preventing workplace violence, 29.5% said there was staff available at all times to respond to such incidents, and just 17% said their employer placed additional staff to reduce the risk of violence.
Part of the problem is due to the challenges of meshing different technology systems and infrastructures, especially in an era of hospital consolidation. Today, it’s not uncommon to see multiple video management or access control systems across different facilities—or even in a single hospital—that are not in sync. That prevents centralized situational awareness—the ability to have real-time visibility into situations while they’re unfolding to help inform decision making.
Integrating physical defenses with IT systems
Health system C-suite leaders and their immediate reports want to have visibility into situations while they’re unfolding. They want to make informed decisions quickly and be prepared for the unplanned. Every second matters in an emergency, and being able to proactively identify threats is important. Hospitals have an advantage when they limit public access to certain entrances—the emergency department, main entry, and so forth—but the more video cameras they can deploy, the better.
Physical security has long since evolved into a high-tech field, and involving IT is critical. Cameras, alarms, and access controls should be part of an integrated physical security information management (PSIM) system to centralize and simplify the monitoring of all aspects of hospital security. Even better is the ability to share real-time video and other data with first responders to help inform their strategy upon arrival.
PSIM technology has undergone major advances, with the ability to serve as an intelligence platform that can listen and connect to any system and produce immediate results securely. Involving IT is critical to leverage the huge amounts of data generated by video management systems and ensure strong information security. Yet many hospitals—especially rural community facilities—lack robust onsite IT resources, highlighting the importance of partnering with a reliable and secure technology platform.
Hospitals should also empower all staff to take an active role in security by making alarms readily available through wall-mounted buttons, pendants, or through IoT devices. As call badges and other communication technologies become more common, those triggers can be activated from virtually anywhere.
Depending on disparate and siloed security technologies is no longer an option, and simply adopting new cameras, AI, bulletproof glass, or alarms isn’t enough. In today’s environment, marked by increasing political division, social unrest, and a steady stream of troubling headlines involving workplace violence and public safety failures, reactive solutions are no longer sufficient.
Keeping hospital employees safe ultimately requires keeping pace with the ingenuity of evil and leveraging advanced technologies to protect your most valued assets – your employees. Healthcare facilities must take a proactive, integrated approach to security that reflects the complex threats of our time.
About Travis Leonardi
Travis Leonardi is the CEO of SOS Technologies, a security systems integrator, and the visionary behind the SmartSOS threat-management platform. A serial entrepreneur, innovative technologist, and registered pharmacist, he has held numerous leadership positions and founded several successful companies in healthcare, pharmacy, and healthcare IT over the last 30 years before pivoting to workplace safety, security, and threat mitigation.
