Randall Walston has spent 35 years with ECU Health and now leads a single police department covering all nine of the system’s hospitals in eastern North Carolina — roughly 150 sworn officers responsible for every campus, satellite, and home health and hospice site. He says his officers are in more physical confrontations than at any point in his tenure, and that assaults on clinical staff have grown more frequent and more severe.
Much of the security technology already in place worked out of sight. Clinical teams kept asking for more, and Mr. Walston came to see that invisibility as part of the problem — staff couldn’t see what was protecting them, and dispatchers often couldn’t see exactly where an incident was unfolding either.
That visibility gap shaped what ECU Health evaluated next. The system moved to Canopy Protect’s wearable duress buttons, designed to surface the exact location of an incident the moment a button is pressed, rather than a general zone or building. For a department covering nine hospitals and dozens of outlying sites, pinpointing the room — not just the floor or campus — was the requirement that mattered most.
The difference showed up almost immediately. One ECU Health hospital handed out the wearables on a Monday morning. Tuesday, a patient attacked an employee in a hallway. A coworker standing feet away pressed their wearable Canopy Button, which was a day old, and officers arrived almost immediately.
In this discussion, Mr. Walston details the evaluation, the rollout across nine hospitals in a single fall, and what became of the objections everyone predicted.
Takeaways include:
- Why proximity notifications rather than dispatch speed set the requirements
- How nursing, IT and senior leadership split the vendor evaluation
- What happened to opt-out and staff-tracking concerns after launch
- Which existing security technologies the system replaced outright