MSS lands $1.3m Yale hospital job

PEEKSKILL, N.Y.--Yale-New Haven Hospital announced Oct. 1 the selection of MSS Security Consultants & Engineers, based here, as the vendor to design the security systems that will be installed in its new 17-story North Pavilion, a cancer treatment facility. The budget is estimated at $1.3 million for the design and installation. Peter Martin, principle engineer at MSS, said the company would build on its recent work at New York City's Bellevue Hospital and Hackensack University Medical Center in designing the new system, as well as evaluating systems already in place throughout YNHH's 10-square-block campus. Martin said his company works in many verticals, but specializes in the institutional and government markets. He said North Pavilion at least avoided his traditionally biggest headache: the prospect of a retrofit. "Bellevue, for instance, was put up in the 1960s," he said, "and to run conventional coax 23 floors high is virtually impossible." There, he ended up finding an unused incinerator shaft and running fiber up that, which, in the end, confirmed his belief in a fiber backbone, which he'll run at YNHH. "Access control, data, and video, it will run on that," he said. "The labor unit cost on that is just so low right now." In integrating the new system into the existing architecture, Martin hopes to improve the blurring and blooming problems the campus security center currently has with plasma screens. "We're going to drive the plasmas straight from the DVR," he said, "make them a lot clearer." MSS will also integrate the new access control system with the existing networked GE solution. Installation of the system will be left to YNHH, with a contract award likely by the end of November. MSS has four in-house engineers and another two out in the field, said Martin. The company has been designing security systems for more than 15 years.