According to the company compared to the CCTV equipment previously used by the hospital, the active monitoring, RAID NVR and end-to-end integration of the megapixel solutions have effectively increased security for hospital staff, patients, visitors, as well as hospital assets.

The City Hospital 8th September was built in early 1970s as a major regional military hospital for the former Yugoslavia. The total area of the facility is approximately 40,000 square meters. Located about 2.5 km from the city center, the City Hospital provides secondary and tertiary medical care with first-class, efficient and cost-effective services for the city of Skopje and Macedonia.

"Security in and around hospitals is always a major concern due to the open nature of these institutions and the sensitivity of hospital operations", said Nakev Slavco of NIK Sistemi, the project integrator. Looking specifically at the City Hospital, every day more than 1,000 people visit the hospital, including patients and their families, medical professionals, as well as hospital suppliers. In addition, security requirements for many areas in the hospital, such as patient rooms and supply rooms, are much more stringent than in regular surveillance applications. For these reasons, the fact that megapixel cameras can cover an area six times larger than traditional CCTV cameras can be especially beneficial to hospital security in spacious locations like the lobby and parking lots. Furthermore, for some specific operation scenarios, such as payment handling and medicine pickup, the megapixel cameras are used to provide six time better detail.

"Many years of experience in the surveillance industry have taught us that the key aspects of a stable security surveillance system are the back-end storage and software/hardware integration of the overall management system", said Slavco. These aspects also affect the integration and compatibility of front-end IP cameras. For the system integrator, the 32 channel megapixel project seemed pretty straightforward, but in terms of CCTV systems this would equal 256 CIF camera recording, and the high bandwidth and storage demand of these cameras could generate major challenges in terms of overall application quality and stability.

"Most NVR solutions are purely software–based and require SIs to integrate the software and hardware themselves", said Slavco. "The level of integration in these solutions is often low. With weak system compatibility and integration, the SI has to spend much time on certification and control. In addition, I/O and storage system integration, as well as concerns related to performance and stability, often give SIs pause when working with megapixel solutions."

NIK Sistemi, an experienced integrator in the security industry selected the complete megapixel solutions offered by Surveon for the hospital project. They NIK Sistemi two Surveon SMR5016 smart megapixel recorders, 30 megapixel vari-focal dome CAM4220 cameras and two IP66 outdoor CAM3260 cameras with D/N and IR LED for installation in different areas of the hospital. Besides the embedded display function of the SMR5016, with Surveon’s VMS client server structure users can also easily monitor images from a remote site by installing a client programme. This structure greatly enhances surveillance management efficiency for the hospital. Furthermore, with the real-time video analytics engine of the SMR5016, the hospital has also been able to upgrade from a traditional passive surveillance management model to an active model featuring intelligent detection.

The complete solutions offered by Surveon helped the City Hospital deploy a highly integrated solution. In addition, the SI was able to significantly reduce the risks and installation complexity often encountered in traditional system integration. For example, the SMR5016 system adopted in this project offers support for five hotswappable disk drives and RAID protection, decreasing installation efforts and making maintenance extremely easy. The embedded hardware RAID5 accelerator ensures that the multi-channel megapixel cameras have access to the required bandwidth when recording images, reducing the instability often seen when systems are conducting high I/O operations for extended periods of time.

Besides the stable and high-performance megapixel video recording offered by the Surveon solutions, features such as active monitoring, smart investigation, as well as different professional CCTV functions, were able to meet the surveillance demands of the City Hospital. Taking real-time video analytics as an example, the solution can detect forbidden areas for patient rooms, supply rooms, etc. The HTML integration can easily combine different aspects into a virtual matrix. Advanced electronic maps and expansion up to eight screens at the user-end can easily meet future demand growth.