Planning Hospital Access Control

Hospital security is a unique challenge. Consider the variety of people who make up the typical hospital environment - patients, staff, vendors, physicians, visitors and even their enemies. Consider the place - many different rooms and spaces, high-value equipment, accessibility to drugs, many entrances and ease-of-movement around the building and premises. Consider a typical hospital - an open feeling, many managers, politics, autonomous physicians, and big desires and limited budgets.

It all adds up to a need for different approaches to security. Hospital managers base their security decisions on law, costs, fear of litigation, and to protect their facility's reputation. But the critical assets of a hospital - its people, property, information and reputation - must be protected with good security.

To analyze security needs, begin by listing the departments, reviewing the business culture of the hospital, determining the threat levels in each department, interviewing department heads about threats and crime, and planning possible countermeasures for each department.

Then develop a master plan and review it against a "reality check" on the basis for the plan and the tools that will be needed. Don't forget that you have options in security.

Professionals should look at the threats likely in specific areas:
- the emergency/trauma department (gang fights, vendettas, domestic conflicts, child custody conflicts, VIP patients);
- infant care area (infant abduction, need for CCTV and infant security);
- pharmacy/drug storage area (alarm and access control systems);
- prisoner care area (receiving, elevator lock-off, surveillance, command center);
- operating rooms (access control, delayed egress hardware, CCTV),
- labs (access control, duress alarms, CCTV);
- nuclear medicine area (access control, CCTV);
- geriatric care area (patient locators, CCTV);
- psychiatric care area (lock-down capability, access control, staff duress, solitary room);
- morgue (decedent services area, access control, alarm system, CCTV); and
- PBX area (late-night security, rest room security, door release, duress alarm).

Don't forget such places as the parking lot (lighting, access control, CCTV in stairwells, duress alarm at fee collection booth), food service area (duress alarm), gift shop (burglar alarm, duress alarm) and shipping/receiving areas (CCTV, patrol). And study the threat potential of biohazard waste storage and disposal (CCTV, access control).

New products such as alarm pagers, infant abduction detection systems, patient wandering systems, CCTV video pursuit systems, people trackers and asset protection systems can each enhance hospital security, Norman suggests.

Indeed hospital security is unique, but with good planning, protection of its assets can be enhanced. Learn more at Millennium Group Access Control Systems

How "Security Aware" are you?

See just how "Security Aware" you really are
Do you believe you're a little more Security Aware? Can you identify the threats that exist in your environment and the steps you should take to avoid them? Take the following quizzes and find out.

• Phishing http://www.onguardonline.gov/games/phishing-scams.aspx
• Spyware http://www.onguardonline.gov/games/beware-spyware.aspx
• Identity Theft http://www.onguardonline.gov/games/id-theft-faceoff.aspx
• Social Networking http://www.onguardonline.gov/games/friend-finder.aspx

Four Tips to Help Keep Your Computer Secure

1.     Anti-virus. A reliable, effective anti-virus program with the latest updates. Both licensed and free anti-virus software are available. Whichever you use, make sure it scans incoming and outgoing emails for malware.

2.     Anti-spyware. Reliable effective anti-spyware is a must for securing your computer. Both licensed and free anti-virus software, such as Windows Defender, are available.

3.     Two-way Personal Firewall. Two-way personal firewall software monitors network traffic to and from your computer and helps block malicious communications.

4.     Anti-Keylogger software. Anti-Keylogger software products, like AntiLogger and Keyscrambler Personal, help prevent what you type on your computer, especially sensitive information such as the usernames, passwords, and financial information you use in making online transactions, from being hijacked by Bad Guys. Learn more at www.millennium-groupinc.com

Keep your employees motivated with these 4 suggestions

It can often be challenging to motivate employees when you’re running a small business. Resources are limited, and time is incredibly valuable. Incentives are critical when it comes to motivation, however; finding cheap and easy incentives is vital.

There are a number of ways to motivate employees that don’t include things like big bonuses or expensive benefits. A hand-written thank you letter can go a long way when it comes to showing employee appreciation. Here are a few other ideas:

1. Ask for input

It means a great deal to most employees to know that their thoughts and opinions are considered. By asking for input and implementing the best suggestions, you are showing them that you cherish their opinions and that they play a significant role in the company.

2. Change it up

Sometimes boredom occurs when employees fall into a rut. By mixing up their projects and responsibilities, and allowing them to show off their skills, you are likely to spark a little inspiration that wasn’t there before.

3. Focus on a great company culture

Some of the best companies to work at are those that employees feel are unique. Developing a great company culture can actually be quite simple and may help you to find and keep strong employees. A game room where employees can take a break and decompress when they’re feeling burned out can do wonders.

4. Recognize people for a job well done

One of the biggest de-motivators can be toiling away on something and feeling like nobody is even aware of your hard work. For this reason, it’s necessary to let employees know that you recognize their hard work and appreciate it.

Something as simple as discussing their accomplishments at a company-wide meeting or sending around an email recognizing their triumphs can make them feel appreciated. Although they may avoid attention, they will likely be pleased to know that they’re being recognized.

All of these techniques are simple, affordable and can do wonders when it comes to motivating employees. Try out one or two of these ideas to see how they may affect employee morale and motivation. This article was brought to you by Millennium Group, The leader in access control solutions. http://www.millennium-groupinc.com

ATM User Safety Tips

ATM users should be advised about what steps they can take to reduce their risk of getting robbed. While it is unlikely that providing safety tips will prevent any particular robbery, the larger purpose is to change ATM users' habits. Safety tips can be provided through mailings to cardholders, signs posted at ATMs, messages printed on ATM receipts, messages displayed on ATM screens, safety presentations, and public awareness campaigns. Listed below are some standard safety tips for ATM users:

o    Be aware of your surroundings, especially between dusk and dawn. If you notice anything suspicious—a security light out, someone loitering nearby—consider coming back later or using a supermarket or convenience store ATM.

o    If using the ATM at night, take someone with you.

o    Park in a well-lit area as close as possible to the ATM.

o    At a drive-through ATM, be sure the doors are locked and the passenger windows are rolled up.

o    If you withdraw cash, put it away promptly; count it later, in private.

o    Put your ATM card and receipt away promptly; never leave your receipt at the ATM.

o    Keep your PIN secret—don't write it down, and don't share it with anyone you don't trust absolutely. Your PIN provides access to your account.

o    Shield the keypad when entering your PIN to keep it from being observed.

o    Avoid being too regular in your ATM use—don't repeatedly visit the same machine at the same time, the same day of the week, for instance.

ATM users should further be advised to close any vestibule doors securely and not to open doors for others. In addition, signs at ATMs should state that the site is being surveilled by cameras.

Some victims resist during robberies either to protect their valuables or because they believe the offender is about to get violent. Some succeed in preventing the robbery through resistance, while others get injured or killed. Offenders want to get the crime over with quickly so they can escape. Any delay increases their nervousness and, therefore, the likelihood they will become violent. Robbers are usually highly agitated and easily perceive the victim's actions as threatening. Drug and alcohol use will obviously influence their emotional state. Some use violence immediately to preempt any resistance. In cases with multiple offenders, the risk of violence increases because each offender is also concerned about appearing tough and in control to the other(s).

As with other violent crimes, victims should assess the particular situation, taking account of nearby assistance, weapons they are threatened with, offenders' behavior and emotional state, their own defensive abilities, and their own psychological need to resist. Given an imperfect understanding of why robbers become violent, compliance is usually the safer course of action for victims, and the best advice for police to offer. Widespread victim compliance, however, undoubtedly leads some offenders to perceive lower risk and, therefore, increases their ATM robbery rates. Stay safe!

For more information on security and access control please visit our website at http://www.millennium-groupinc.com

Is your website optimized for search engines?

1. Choosing Keywords
The basic premise of keyword optimization is simple: Discover the search words that potential customers are using to find products or services like yours, and then build your Web content around those words. What complicates matters is that countless other websites are trying to do the same thing.

Understand the competitive ratio. Generally speaking, the more popular (or potentially lucrative) the search term, the more websites compete to rank high for that search term. Yes, you want to rank high on popular terms -- but if you don't have limitless resources, it is wise to target search terms for which you have a realistic shot at a high ranking. The best keywords, says Jill Whalen, a longtime SEO practitioner and head of the consultancy High Rankings, are "words and phrases that are being searched but that may have been overlooked by other websites."

An effective way to find such terms is to calculate the ratio of the number of pages a search returns to the popularity of the search term. "You have to look at the competitiveness of every keyword phrase that's relevant to what you offer," Whalen says.

Do the math. First, draw up a list of the keywords -- or, better yet, keyword phrases -- a potential customer might plausibly search if he or she were looking for your product. (A bike retailer, for example, might start with variations on bike, bicycle, and cycling; a specialty shop might also try bike frames and bike components.)

Then, see how often users search for these terms by plugging each into keyword-tracking tools such as Wordtracker (wordtracker.com), Keyword Discovery (keyworddiscovery.com), or Google AdWords's Keyword Tool (adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). The Google AdWords tool is free, and the website SEOBook.com offers a free, though less robust, version of Wordtracker. Besides showing how many times these phrases are searched on average in a day or month, these tools will suggest other relevant terms. You may learn, for instance, that bicycle parts is a much more popular search term than bicycle components.

Next, run each phrase through Google. The more websites returned, the more competition you will have with that phrase. (In general, Woessner recommends devising terms that generate fewer than one million page hits.)

Finally, divide the number of indexed pages by the number of daily searches. The lower the result, the more promising the term. Ideally, says Woessner, the ratio should be 500 to 1 or less.

Narrow your keywords. If your ratio is higher than 500 to 1, you will probably want to choose narrower or more specific keywords. For example, if you do most of your business locally, you would be smart to add a geographic term to each keyword used on top-level pages. (Bicycle shop becomes bicycle shop Poughkeepsie.) Such a search is less popular, but the competition to win it is much less fierce, so it is likely to generate a better ratio.

There's no need to generate an exhaustive list of phrases. However, because each page of a website has a different focus or objective, each should have its own keywords. The homepage should have the most general terms, and keywords should become more tailored and specific as you burrow deeper into the site.

2. Placing Keywords Strategically
Once you have determined the best keywords to use, you need to employ them strategically, in two places.

In the code. It is the search engine that ultimately associates a keyword with a webpage, and the first place it looks to decipher a page is at the top of the page's coding -- within the so-called head tag that defines the page's overall characteristics. (A webpage's code, of course, isn't normally visible in a browser window; to see it, use the browser's "source" or "page source" command.) Incorporate the keywords you have chosen in the title, description, and keywords tags. These are often called meta tags, and the code often begins with that word.

The title will appear at the top of the user's browser window, and the description is often quoted by search engines, so these should be coherent and concise -- the title should be six to 12 words, according to Bruce Clay, a leading SEO consultant, and the description 12 to 24 words. Your title and description should reinforce each other and the page's visible content. If you have a lot of keywords, choose judiciously, because search engines prize natural-sounding language. You can load all your keywords, even misspelled variants, into the keywords tag field.

In the visible content. Your keywords should appear frequently in the text, as well as in the other elements of a page, including the descriptive "alt" tags that underlie images and in the headlines and subheads atop a section of text. Though there is no agreement among optimizers about how much text a page should include or how frequently keywords should be mentioned, they do agree on this: If people find your copy thoughtful and worth reading, a search engine will, too. Never stuff a page so full of keywords that it doesn't read naturally.

3. Building a Better Website
How your site is organized, designed, and built will affect its search-engine ranking, according to Andy Robson, managing director of the optimizing firm dzine it. Organize content into themed categories, what Clay calls silos. "By lining up your content by the way people search, you define to the search engine what you're about," Clay says. You can either group similar pages together into separate directories of folders and subfolders, or you can create "virtual silos" by using links that guide a user from one page to the next.

Other strategies are more technical, so you may need to rely on a Web developer for assistance. The site must be hosted on a fast server. The page code should be free of bugs and fully comply with the standards for website structure set by the World Wide Web Consortium. (You can test this at validator.w3.org.) Include in the site's code a special protocol known as Sitemap, which makes it easier for visiting search engines to scan the site. Sitemaps can be submitted directly to the search engines.

Seeding Links

Once you have optimized your website, you want to attract links from other sites. SEO consultants offer a fairly prosaic strategy: Build a good site with useful content to which other sites will want to send their readers. Here are a few strategies to grease that wheel.

Lend your expertise. Forge partnerships under which other sites can publish your repurposed or original content on the condition that they link back to your site. "Sharing your expertise about the product or the service can differentiate your brand," says Stephen Woessner. "The brand story is what gets somebody to purchase one product over another."

Find out who's linking to your competition. Many of them probably should be linking to you as well. The "links" tool at faganfinder.com/urlinfo reports the inbound links to a website detected by the major search engines. Many of those links will come from directories that are important to your industry or community. There's no sin in requesting a link -- or in trading content for one.

Be choosy about linkers. "You want the best sites, not the most, to link to you," says Bruce Clay. "If an expert links to you, by association you're an expert" (provided the expert is in your subject area). By the same token, avoid link farms, or websites that exist solely to provide outbound links, and services that sell links outright. Search engines, says Clay, will penalize you for the chicanery.

SEO Subterfuge

The techniques we have talked about here are often described as ethical, organic, or natural SEO. By contrast, black hat SEO embraces manipulative or deceptive techniques to game the search-engine system. Search engines work hard to keep these techniques from working, so they are seldom effective for long and could even get you blacklisted. Here are several strategies that you are best off avoiding.

Cloaking: Presenting two different versions of the same page, one to search engines and one to users.

Keyword stuffing, or spamming: Loading up the meta tags with popular search terms that have no substantive connection with the page.

Hidden links and keywords: Concealing them in the background color, outside the visible margins, or in other code.

A great example of an optimized website is the Millennium Group website www.millennium-groupinc.com

Internal Theft and Fraud Costs Businesses $40 Billion a Year

Why rob a bank, when it’s so easy to steal from your employer?

• Retail theft rose by 5.9% in 2009, the biggest increase since 2001.
• But it's not the shoplifters retailers have to worry about.
• Dishonest employees steal about 6.6 times more than shoplifters.
• In fact, one out of every 28 retail employees was caught thieving in 2009.

Need a laptop? Just grab one from the office

• In 2005, theft of office equipment cost employers $550 million.
• By 2007, it cost employers $656 million.
• By 2009, it cost $747 million.
• Want that equipment back?
• Good luck.
• 96% of stolen office equipment is never recovered.

Often, the most dangerous culprit is someone on the inside

• According to Forrester Research, employee theft of sensitive information is 10 times costlier per incident than any accidental sharing of sensitive data.
• Forrester recommends, “Enterprises should focus more of their resources on stopping the most damaging incidents: deliberate theft by insiders and abuse by outsiders.”

What other crimes should businesses watch out for?

• Theft and fraud costs businesses $40 billion a year.
• It happens without guns, without violence and often, without detection.
• And 40% of these crimes are committed by trusted employees – not strangers.

Any organization could be a target

• It's not just consumer goods and laptops up for grabs.
• Companies need to protect their proprietary secrets, knowledge and processes that:
• Generate revenue
• Increase profits
• Provide competitive advantage
• This information can be stored almost anywhere, from Word documents and presentations to CAD drawings and flowcharts.

How much is that data worth?

• Knowledge-intensive industries accrue 70 to 80% of their portfolio value from proprietary data and secrets.
• What industries are we talking about?
• Manufacturing
• Information services
• Professional, scientific and technical services
• Transportation
• When their important data is stolen, leaked or misused, the impact can be catastrophic.

Visit www.millennium-groupinc.com for information on how to prevent internal theft and fraud.