Need ideas for a hospital entry control kiosk

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tirdil
Posts: 9
Joined: Thu 25 Feb 2010, 09:30

Need ideas for a hospital entry control kiosk

#1 Post by tirdil »

Hi, Everyone!

Great to be here. I'm a new puppy user like probably many of you and also now a windows refugee. Learned about puppy while looking for a solution to the "black screen of death" and blank screen with just a blinking cursor.

Someone in one of the help threads mentioned puppy. Installed it to help with that...did real well dual booting with windows 7....decided to get fancy and shrink my windows 7 partition using gparted and lost my ability to dual boot. (Probably now a blessing in disguise)

in this last month (Since February 18th or so) I've learned how to use almost everything (my favourite programs) and then some and find the thought of going back to microsoft products disturbing.

Anyway, My boss has tasked me with setting up an internet kiosk at the hospital where I work which will be used as a way of communicating with visitors wanting to gain entry to a secured unit (the Women's Center aka L&D or Labor and Deliver)

The way its supposed to work from what my boss told me is similiar to the kiosk system that Verizon uses in their stores. I'm not familiar with this...never seen it, don't think I need to.

The concept I understand; the method is what I'm working on.

We already have in place a videophone at the main entrance to the unit called an Aiphone. This allows for two-way communication between visitors and Public Safety. Public safety have both audio + video while visitors get audio only.

Sometimes there is difficulty hearing people over the video phone and occassionally language barriers where the persons at opposite ends don't always speak the same language or have limited english.

The kiosk Idea was presented by my boss and a colleague to be a way of making our Women's Center unit more secure. Essentially the person needs the ability to type in who they want to see. Public Safety then looks up the patients info on another software program to determine if they are on the unit or not. If they are there, Public Safety presses a button that unlocks the main entrance for five seconds to allow a person to get in.

I think that's as simple as it gets.

From the description my colleague gave he wanted to have a digital display setup over the main entrance to L&D that would display when a person waiting could visit. Sometimes visitors can't always go in for various reasons and have to wait...by using some type of display (like one of those long rectangular things with the programmable red led displays) this could be accomplished.

It seems like it would add a lot more work to the job than is necessary by overcomplicating things with extra steps and processes but the powers-that-be who are in charge want Public Safety to verify every visitor to the unit remotely.

I'm open to any thoughts, suggestions or ideas.

I've already considered modifying a webscript to use similiar to a customised version of phpbb. I've got example on my local hd...matter of fact I'd appreciate it if any of you could access that page and offer ideas.

It's located here:

[link removed]

It's only accessible whenever I'm online and my computer is on and booted into Lighthouse Puppy 4.31

I'll try to leave it up as much as possible. I also considered maybe keeping the front page of that bbs and incorporating a chat script into....we will have to run it locally on a private network at the hospital....i've installed an irc server on this (homepc) that I'm using for testing.

I could use much help with this. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

Other ideas I wanted to add to that default page would be an option to enable the visitors and Public Safety to speak to each other via a webcam with skype or some other voip preferable free client but also something that can be run privately as it needs to be an inhouse service for HIPPA (privacy) violations not to occur.

So only works through our hospital network on private ip.

The webserver and the irc we already know we can do...not sure about the voip...not sure what I'll do about the Aiphone either..doesn't seem like we'll need both.

Incidentally we're going to use an upgrade videogame console I saw mentioned else where to serve as the shell for the kiosk...would love to incorporate the video camera, voip, irc and static webpage similiar to the initial layout of the test forum in the link mentioned above all into one nice cohesive unit.

What do you guys/gals think? Please tell me.

Awaiting some input.

-tirdil
Last edited by tirdil on Tue 13 Apr 2010, 00:29, edited 1 time in total.

cthisbear
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#2 Post by cthisbear »


DMcCunney
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Re: Need ideas for a hospital entry control kiosk

#3 Post by DMcCunney »

tirdil wrote: The kiosk Idea was presented by my boss and a colleague to be a way of making our Women's Center unit more secure. Essentially the person needs the ability to type in who they want to see. Public Safety then looks up the patients info on another software program to determine if they are on the unit or not. If they are there, Public Safety presses a button that unlocks the main entrance for five seconds to allow a person to get in.

I think that's as simple as it gets.
Take Puppy out of the equation and look at what you need to do. I don't consider the solution stated as in any way secure. All it proves is that the person requesting access knows how to write the name of a female patient. (And depending upon the language, they may know how to write it in a language you can't read and your kiosk can't handle, like, say, Chinese ideographs.)

You need to know who the visitor is, and their purpose in seeing the patient. Let's say that a woman is in your care at all because she's been battered by an abusive parent/sibling/spouse/lover, and the abuser comes to visit. Oops... (There are abusers crazy enough that they really would try for another round when she's laid up in a hospital bed.)

Puppy might be appropriate for powering the kiosk, but the kiosk as described won't aid safety and security.
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Dennis

tirdil
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Joined: Thu 25 Feb 2010, 09:30

#4 Post by tirdil »

DMcCunney, thanks for the great point. Thanks also Sylvander and cthisbear for your replies.
Last edited by tirdil on Wed 24 Mar 2010, 16:20, edited 1 time in total.

raffy
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simple

#5 Post by raffy »

Hmm, why not keep it simple?

Have posted/paper instruction on the PC for the guest to type the patient's name. You can have a video monitoring the typed name (you can use two screens, can't you?).

Then if it's GO, Public Safety switches on a green bulb. If NO, switch on a red bulb.

Place a button on the screen that says "Enter new name". This clears the old entry.
Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? [url=http://puppylinux.info/topic/freeoffice-2012-sfs]Get the sfs (English only)[/url].

tirdil
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Joined: Thu 25 Feb 2010, 09:30

#6 Post by tirdil »

raffy, good point in keeping it simple...but going back to DMcCunney's take on this that wouldn't make it secure.

I had my mind wrapped around the technical aspect of how to accomplish the suggested goal that I totally neglected actual security.

If the method you recommended was utilised a person who was visiting for wrong intentions could just use the name of the person already entered if it was still present on the screen.

Going back to DMcCunney's view on safety - He is right this isn't secure at all.

In the past access control was done differently at its most secure point. Public Safety was given a list of approved visitors for each patient and if the person visiting wasn't on the approved list then Public Safety would have to call the room number to get approval from the patient before sending in the guest.

As things stand now we've just been allowing entry if they know the name of the person they want to visit and it matches on our patient list that the person is patient in the hospital.

One caveat is that if a person doesn't want visitors or wishes to restrict visitation from certain parties they have the option of requesting it by filling out a visitor restriction form for public safety to use as a means of screening visitors for that patient.

I'm also interested on hearing any advice from anyone else that is or has been involved in Healthcare safety or security on how they protect access to their maternity and Pediatric ward.

Thanks, again.

-tirdil

DMcCunney
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#7 Post by DMcCunney »

tirdil wrote: As things stand now we've just been allowing entry if they know the name of the person they want to visit and it matches on our patient list that the person is patient in the hospital.

One caveat is that if a person doesn't want visitors or wishes to restrict visitation from certain parties they have the option of requesting it by filling out a visitor restriction form for public safety to use as a means of screening visitors for that patient.
If Public Safety isn't currently vetting the visitors, just how are these requested exclusions enforced?
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#8 Post by Lobster »

Watchdog may be of interest
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/WatchDog
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Puppy Links Page http://www.smokey01.com/bruceb/puppy.html :D

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Pizzasgood
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#9 Post by Pizzasgood »

I was following you until you got to phpbb. You totally lost me there. I can see using a webserver to mediate the communications rather than using a more direct method. But a forum?

I'm guessing the reason you can't just have a human sitting behind thick glass is because the people who need to be looking this stuff up are at the other end of the building?
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