How legacy safety system separation undermines real-time response

Both Ryan Schonfeld, co-founder and CEO of HiveWatch, and Peter Evans, CEO of Xtract One Technologies, point to the same structural problem from different angles: Hospital safety systems were never designed to operate as a coordinated whole.

Schonfeld observes that fire systems, access control, video surveillance, and alarm infrastructure are often installed by different vendors, overseen by different teams, and updated on different timelines. As a result, critical systems do not share context when incidents occur.

Evans reinforces this concern from an emergency department (ED) security perspective. He explains that when a hospital cannot determine how or where a threat entered—because its access points, alarms, and detection systems are not integrated—response is delayed and staff are placed at greater risk.

This fragmentation becomes especially dangerous during alarm events, Schonfeld notes. Doors may unlock, but security teams may lack immediate visibility into which access points were used or whether the entry was authorized. Meanwhile, staff must respond without knowing whether they are dealing with an accidental alarm, an opportunistic intrusion, or an escalating threat.

Schonfield and Evans suggest that the underlying issue is not technological capability but system design assumptions. Older facilities were not built with centralized data correlation in mind: Security posts were designed for observation rather than investigation, and alarms were intended to prompt evacuation, not threat assessment. Modern security environments, meanwhile, demand systems that can correlate access activity, video context, and alarm events in real time.

For hospitals operating in legacy buildings, this means safety improvements cannot focus on a system in isolation. Door behavior, alarm response, access visibility, and staff deployment must be evaluated together—because during a real incident, they will fail together if they are not designed to work harmoniously.

“Can weapons currently enter our ED undetected?” Evans asks. “If the answer is yes, that's a quantifiable risk. Track reported incidents where weapons were discovered after entry and document near-misses where weapons were found during patient care, not at entry screening.”

The data that moves leadership is the documentation of weapons that entered your facility, time security spent responding to threats that screening would have caught, and the liability exposure from incidents that occurred because screening didn't exist, according to Evans.

“Compare the cost of implementing screening, medical treatment, workers' compensation, litigation, staff turnover, and regulatory scrutiny against the cost of a single workplace violence incident—because the ROI calculation isn't theoretical,” Evans says.

Editor’s note: This article was excerpted from our Healthcare Safety Leader newsletter.