Why do healthcare facilities feel they have to choose between compromising security for patient experience or compromising patient experience for security? With traditional screening methods creating institutional barriers at precisely the moment patients are most vulnerable, healthcare providers have been forced to choose between two essential priorities.
Unlike airports and government buildings, healthcare facilities serve individuals who are often already in states of distress. Patients arrive carrying medical devices, personal items, or accompanied by worried family members. They’re also navigating unfamiliar environments while managing pain, anxiety, or concern.
“Everybody wants to be safe, but a lot of people don’t want to be inconvenienced,” notes Kevin Mahan, Vice President of Security and Safety at Community Health Network, highlighting the tension that traditional screening methods consistently fail to resolve.
Where Traditional Screening Methods Break Down
The failure of conventional security approaches in healthcare settings manifests in several critical areas:
1. The Patient Dignity Problem
Traditional metal detectors and manual screening create immediate dignity issues for patients. Those with medical devices, implants, or mobility aids face uncomfortable explanations, pat-downs, or questioning at a moment when they’re already vulnerable. The psychological impact of this experience directly contradicts the environment of care that healthcare facilities strive to create.
Data from Sentara Healthcare’s security implementation reveals that 5.6% of individuals entering their facilities carried items that would trigger traditional metal detectors — yet many of these were legitimate personal items that posed no security threat. The false positive problem creates unnecessary stress for patients and inefficiency for staff.
2. The Operational Bottleneck Challenge
Healthcare facilities operate on precise schedules with complex patient processing flows. Traditional security screening creates bottlenecks that ripple throughout the system, affecting:
- Appointment timeliness
- Emergency department response
- Staff workflow
- Visitor access during limited visiting hours
When Community Health Network implemented more advanced screening, they discovered their operational efficiency actually improved compared to traditional methods. “The outcomes and comfort that our caregivers are experiencing have significantly increased demand to protect all entrances not currently protected,” Mahan reports.
3. The Architectural Mismatch
Most healthcare facilities were designed decades before current security concerns emerged. As Mahan observes, “When these hospitals were built 40 plus years ago, everything was all about convenience… I don’t think designers and architects really thought about people walking in with AR-15s.”
This architectural reality means that traditional screening methods often require facility modifications that are prohibitively expensive or physically impossible without major renovations. Multiple entry points, historical buildings, and space constraints make conventional security approaches impractical.
Sentara Healthcare faced this exact challenge across their 12 hospitals in Virginia and North Carolina. Their facilities were designed for healing, not security screening, creating spatial and aesthetic conflicts with traditional methods.
4. The Resource Allocation Dilemma
Traditional security screening is labor-intensive, requiring dedicated personnel to operate equipment, conduct secondary screenings, and manage exceptions. For healthcare facilities already facing staffing challenges, this creates an impossible resource allocation problem.
Community Health Network’s implementation of Xtract One’s Smarteway detected and prevented 281 guns, 2,393 knives, and 401 other prohibited items from entering their facilities across nine entry points in just six and a half months. Managing this volume of potential threats with traditional methods would require staffing levels that most healthcare facilities simply cannot sustain.
5. The Healing Environment Contradiction
Traditional security measures create an immediate psychological contradiction to the healing mission of healthcare environments. Visible metal detectors, uniformed security personnel conducting pat-downs, and bag searches can establish an atmosphere of suspicion and institutional control rather than care and healing.
This contradiction undermines the therapeutic environment before treatment even begins. As Stephen Hollowell at Sentara Healthcare explains, they needed “a solution that was easy to use, didn’t need regular maintenance, and allowed our staff and anyone visiting our facilities to feel safe and comfortable.”
Redefining Security for Healthcare Environments
The solution to healthcare’s security challenge isn’t found in making traditional methods less intrusive — it requires fundamentally reimagining how security integrates with the patient journey. Next-generation solutions like Xtract One Gateway are designed specifically to address the failures of traditional screening in healthcare settings.
Beyond the weapons detected, Community Health Network observed that 1,245 visitors turned around when they saw the Gateway system, and 1,687 visitors returned to their vehicles after initial alerts. This deterrent effect demonstrates that effective security doesn’t require compromising the patient experience. In fact, it can enhance it by creating environments where both patients and staff feel genuinely protected.
Sentara Healthcare’s 90-day pilot program revealed similar benefits, with weapons detection rates actually declining over time as the deterrent effect took hold. This outcome represents the ideal security scenario: threats prevented without disruption to care.
The healthcare facilities best positioned for the future will be those that recognize security not as a necessary evil that competes with patient care, but as an integral component of creating truly healing environments. When patients and staff no longer have to choose between feeling safe and feeling cared for, healthcare can more fully deliver on its core promise.