Rethinking Security Among the Healthcare Workforce Crisis

Hospitals and health systems are operating in one of the most challenging environments in modern healthcare. Workforce shortages remain severe, violence against healthcare workers continues to rise, financial pressures grow as labor costs and reimbursement gaps widen, and new staffing-related legislative shifts add further strain.

According to McKinsey and Company, nearly half of health-system leaders expect negative margins or minimal improvement ahead, with workforce strain a top destabilizing force. As a result, security teams must protect larger facilities and meet increasingly stringent regulatory expectations, often without additional staff.

In this environment, “doing more with less” has become the new reality for clinicians and security leaders alike. 

Yet the strongest health systems aren’t simply tightening budgets or asking existing staff to absorb more responsibilities. They are fundamentally rethinking how physical security supports patient experience, staff well-being and operational resilience. Further, they are embracing technologies and strategies that shift security from a reactive function to a proactive, integrated part of care delivery.

Below are the new non-negotiables for securing healthcare spaces amid sustained workforce and financial pressure.

1. Security must be reactive by design

For decades, hospitals relied heavily on traditional, labor-intensive approaches. This included on-site guards, passive camera systems and incident review after something had already gone wrong. In today’s environment, marked by staffing shortages, rising aggression and expanding campuses, reactive security simply can’t keep pace.

Forward-thinking organizations are adopting proactive models that enable security teams to identify and intervene earlier, even with fewer people on the ground. These include:

• Real-time analytics that detect unusual behavior or activity patterns.
• Audio-based alerting that recognizes aggression or distress before violence escalates.
• Remote monitoring capabilities that allow specialists off-site to assist on-site teams.
• Automated workflows that immediately escalate verified threats to response teams.

These tools reduce cognitive load, eliminate blind spots and give security staff precious minutes to act before an event becomes an emergency.

In a workforce-strained environment, proactive models strengthen safety and help compensate for the personnel gaps that have become the norm.

2. Safety strategy is now a patient-experience strategy

In an era where hospitals compete on trust, experience and outcomes, safety cannot be siloed from patient care.

Patients and families increasingly equate security with quality. A calm, orderly environment lowers anxiety, reduces perceived wait times and improves overall satisfaction. Meanwhile, frontline clinicians like nurses, physicians and technicians are more likely to stay in organizations where they feel protected and supported.

The reality is that violence and aggression toward healthcare workers continue to rise nationally. Emergency departments remain high-risk zones for both staff and visitors. Additionally, behavioral-health patient volumes have increased across most systems. Finally, staff burnout is directly tied to perceived safety and support.

Security leaders who align their strategies with patient-experience goals see measurable benefits. Clear wayfinding, streamlined access control, visitor-management policies that feel welcoming rather than punitive and rapid response to disruptive behavior all contribute to a safer and more compassionate care environment.

3. Access control must balance security, mobility and warmth

With fewer staff available to watch entrances, escort visitors or manually check credentials, access control is becoming the frontline of patient-centered safety.

But “secure” can’t mean “fortress-like.” Families still need to feel welcome. Staff shouldn’t face unnecessary friction as they move between units. And emergency departments, often the most vulnerable entry points, need systems that support both high throughput and high visibility.

The emerging best practices include mobile-based credentials that reduce badge-management burden, role-based access that adapts as staffing assignments shift, visitor management systems that improve guidance and reduce lobby congestion and unified identity management that limits unauthorized access without increasing complexity. The goal is smarter access with a system that protects clinical workflows rather than interrupting them.

4. Hybrid cloud security helps systems “do more with less”

One of the biggest challenges for healthcare IT and security teams is maintaining dozens, sometimes hundreds, of legacy systems that rely on local servers, require frequent manual updates and exist in fragmented silos across multiple facilities. This decentralization increases operational burden, introduces vulnerabilities and forces teams to spend far more time maintaining the system than improving it.

Hybrid cloud architectures offer a compelling alternative. By blending cloud-based video or access platforms with on-premise control for sensitive areas, health systems can modernize without compromising security. This approach reduces manual maintenance, standardizes security across locations, enables remote system management, supports faster forensic searches and allows capabilities to scale without large capital investment. Cloud migration once felt risky. Today, for organizations facing labor shortages and budget constraints, failing to modernize carries even greater long-term risk.

5. Data is becoming the most undervalued security asset

Historically, most healthcare organizations treated security systems as tools for documentation, not transformation. But the data emerging from modern systems, including analytics, incident patterns, occupancy trends, access logs and behavioral indicators, can become a powerful source of operational intelligence.

And the next evolution of this intelligence will be driven by AI-generated metadata. In the past, security technologies were focused primarily on reducing false alarms. Now, AI enables hospitals to capture far richer context: behavioral patterns, heat maps, movement flows and predictive trends that reveal how people use space. This goes well beyond object identification. It allows hospitals to understand where bottlenecks consistently form, which entrances experience recurring unauthorized access attempts or where loitering in parking areas may signal escalating safety risks.

For hospitals facing persistent staffing shortages, these insights help leaders optimize workflows, redeploy resources, reinforce high-risk areas and improve environmental design. What was once a cost center becomes a data engine that strengthens both security strategy and day-to-day operations.

7. Hospitals must prepare for a reality where workplace violence is the norm

While hospitals have long dealt with tense situations, the scale and frequency of aggression in clinical settings has changed. National reporting continues to show rising incidents of verbal and physical violence against nurses and frontline staff.

Because security teams cannot be everywhere, leading health systems are adopting layered strategies that help detect and de-escalate threatening behavior earlier. This includes real-time recognition of escalating behavior through tone or agitation, heightened monitoring in behavioral-health and emergency areas and rapid-escalation protocols that bring security, clinicians and administrators together quickly. Many organizations are also redesigning physical spaces to improve visibility and reduce environmental triggers that can escalate stress or conflict.

The goal is to create environments where clinicians feel empowered and protected, and where patients in crisis can be supported with dignity.

A security mandate for a new healthcare era

The workforce crisis is reshaping healthcare in significant ways. As hospitals adapt to a landscape marked by staffing shortages, financial pressure and escalating safety concerns, security can no longer operate as an afterthought or a cost center.

It must be a strategic enabler that protects the workforce, which in turn protects everyone else.

The health systems that will succeed in the years ahead are those that embrace proactive models, modern technology, hybrid cloud foundations and safety strategies designed around the human experience of care. These organizations recognize that security is foundational to patient trust, staff retention, operational continuity and organizational resilience.

The question facing healthcare leaders today isn’t whether they can afford to rethink their security approach. It’s whether they can afford not to.

Photo: Aitor Diago, Getty Images

Ken Poole is the Chief Revenue Officer at Security 101, where he drives national sales and revenue strategy. With more than two decades of leadership in revenue operations, Ken specializes in building high-performing teams, delivering predictable growth and translating go-to-market vision into results. Security 101 is known for delivering concierge-level service with national reach. Ken works closely with the company’s partners and clients to deploy proactive, customized security solutions.

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