Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital

Challenge

MLKCH is more than just a hospital: It’s a healthcare leader playing a critical role in the overall health and livelihood of the economically diverse community it serves. The hospital is designed to support the community needs of South Los Angeles, including underinsured or uninsured patients, and it’s the only hospital in the nearby area. With a constant influx of patients and workers in and out of the building, it’s vital that hospital security keep a pulse on local incidents and threats, as well as threats on its campus.

In a socially diverse community with a high crime rate, the hospital is vulnerable to threats that take place nearby the campus. This challenged the hospital’s ability to keep patients safe and efficiently respond to emergencies happening in the area. The security team constantly received information from local police or staff members about incidents that posed a potential threat to the campus. However, it was often too late to act on, coming in hours after the event occurred. Timely notification about an active assailant, robbery or domestic violence can mean the difference between saving a life or getting to a patient in need faster. Also, timely risk intelligence could initiate a campus-wide lockdown and prevent a major crisis, such as a perpetrator entering the building.

In 2020, the onset of civil unrest coupled with the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic in a community full of essential workers where COVID surged made MLKCH more vulnerable than ever to external threats. Evolving protests, officer-involved shootings, road closures and other external events directly impacted the hospital’s ability to keep its people safe and provide care to the community. At a time when record numbers of patients required treatment due to COVID-19, the security team needed to be able to act on threats as soon as — if not before — they occurred.

Previously, security at MLKCH relied on manual data analysis to monitor external events, spending hours combing through social media, local news, community tips and phone calls to determine whether an incident was credible and threatened their campus. With the increase of risk, the security team was specifically looking to:

• Get ahead of evolving risks, by conducting real-time risk analysis about what was unfolding outside the hospital to mitigate risks to staff, patients, facilities and even the ambulance fleet.
• Quickly and accurately communicate adverse events that impact the campus, patients, staff and hospital operations in one place.
• Filter out the noise of threats and incidents happening locally, so only information with an impact to MLKCH’s people, places and property was received.
• Receive risk intelligence alerts from any location via push notification, text or email.

From hospital staff to ambulance drivers to the street medicine team, MLKCH had to coordinate responses across many teams for different reasons. Ensuring the teams and operations affected by a situation had the right information to respond was critical in saving patients’ lives and the lives of medical providers.

Solution

MLKCH looked to OnSolve^® to help them build out a robust, AI-powered risk intelligence program. Access to targeted, real-time information from OnSolve Risk Intelligence helped security develop effective responses that minimized disruptions to operations. With OnSolve, MLKCH was empowered with:

• Improved and accelerated delivery of relevant, actionable threat intelligence, pinpointing the impact of a risk using human analysts, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms that automatically notifying designated response team members regarding the type, severity and location of the emerging threat. This process went from hours to seconds.
• An intuitive analytics dashboard with dynamic maps, offering greater visibility into the security of the MLKCH team, logistics and personnel movements, allowing security teams across departments to leverage one source to rapidly observe, analyze and escalate relevant information to the right people at the right time.
• Actionable intelligence using geo-targeted AI tracking to bypass irrelevant data and filter in only the information specific to a defined area of interest, such as homicides or closed roads that impact ambulance routes.
• A solution built for mobile devices, so users receive risk intelligence alerts targeted to their current location while on the move, particularly vital for ambulances and other urgent care needs.

Results

From the emergency room to large-scale public vaccination events and in-home care, with OnSolve, Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital’s security team can get ahead of evolving risks, operate with minimal disruption and better protect the community and save lives. MLKCH benefits from:

• More confident, data-based decision-making about how to handle a potential threat
• Peace of mind that healthcare workers, patients and the community are safe
• Operational agility and seamless communications across security teams to keep the hospital running smoothly

Gone are the days of waiting to hear about incidents after they’ve happened. Geo-targeted, actionable intelligence arms MLKCH with the information they need to prepare for an event before it occurs. As MLKCH implements innovative street medicine and in-home care visits for citizens living in homes, shelters or other non-traditional environments, OnSolve Risk Intelligence creates a solid and secure foundation for which to scale the program and ensure its success.