MGM Solutions Redefines Patient Elopement Prevention With RTLS That Works Indoors and Outdoors

Veteran-owned developer of the SecurTRAK platform says the industry has been protecting the door while patients disappear across the campus, and is proving there is a better way.

PAULSBORO, N.J., October 6, 2026. Every elopement prevention system on the market can sound an alarm when an at-risk patient approaches a monitored door. Almost none of them can answer the question that decides whether that patient comes back safely: where is the patient ninety seconds after the alarm, crossing a parking lot, entering a courtyard, or walking toward the tree line at the edge of the campus?

MGM Solutions, the New Jersey-based developer of the SecurTRAK life-safety platform, today announced an expanded national campaign around what it calls campus-wide elopement prevention: continuous, real-time patient location that does not stop at the exit door, delivered indoors and outdoors on a single infrastructure. The company, an SBA-certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB), has deployed the approach in U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers, some of the largest and most complex healthcare campuses in the country, since 2002.

“The industry has spent twenty years perfecting the door alarm, and patients are still being found in retention ponds and parking garages,” said Mike Maurer, President of MGM Solutions and a U.S. Navy veteran with more than 35 years in real-time locating systems. “The door is not the finish line. It is the starting line. If your system goes blind the moment a patient steps outside, you do not have an elopement prevention system. You have a doorbell.”

The Stakes: A Problem Measured in Lives

Roughly 400,000 patients leave healthcare facilities without authorization every year. For patients missing longer than 24 hours, reported fatality rates reach 25 percent. The Joint Commission treats elopement as a critical patient-safety issue, and hospitals face it most acutely with the patients least able to protect themselves: those with dementia, traumatic brain injury, psychiatric conditions, or altered mental status.

Healthcare campuses compound the risk. A modern medical center, and especially a VA medical center, is not a building. It is dozens of acres of grounds, walkways, courtyards, parking structures, and outbuildings. When a determined patient slips out through a fire exit or tailgates a visitor through a monitored door, staff at most facilities are left searching that entire footprint on foot, against the clock, with no location data at all.

What Campus-Wide Actually Means

SecurTRAK’s PatienTRAK module was engineered around a different assumption: protection must be continuous, everywhere the patient can go. The platform delivers:

Room-level certainty indoors. Diffused infrared sensing tells staff which room, and which bed, a tagged patient occupies, at all times, without guesswork.
Continuous location outdoors. A 433 MHz active RFID backbone, a frequency chosen for its ability to penetrate walls and floors and carry across open ground, keeps the same patient tag visible in courtyards, parking lots, and campus grounds.
Instant chokepoint detection. Low-frequency exciters at doors, gates, and elevators trigger immediate alerts, and immediate action, the moment an at-risk patient reaches a transition point.
One tag, one map, one alerting pipeline. The badge that shows a patient safely in Room 214 is the same badge that shows them in Parking Lot C seconds later, on the same console staff already watch. There is no second system to check, no seam where protection quietly ends.

“When a facility asks vendors just one question, show me the patient’s live location after the door breach, outside the building, on your map, most of the industry goes quiet,” Maurer said. “We built SecurTRAK so that question has an answer.”

More Than an Alarm: The Building Responds

Because SecurTRAK integrates directly with the systems hospitals already own, an elopement alert is not just a sound at a nurses’ station. Doors can lock. Elevators can hold. CCTV cameras can be called up automatically so security sees the event as it unfolds, and Nurse Call systems can carry the alert into the workflow nurses already use. The result is a coordinated response measured in seconds, not a search party assembled in minutes.

The platform runs on a dedicated, hardwired life-safety network rather than shared hospital Wi-Fi, which means an IT outage or a network maintenance window does not silence a life-safety alert. That design discipline is one reason the platform has maintained 99.8 percent uptime across two decades of continuous operation.

Proven Where the Stakes Are Highest

MGM Solutions has delivered patient-tracking systems in hospitals since 1993 and has served VA medical centers since 2002, completing more than 40 VA projects as prime contractor with TRM-approved software and the highest level of VA background-investigation clearance. In one documented deployment, a VA facility saved $1.63 million by replacing around-the-clock patient sitters with PatienTRAK’s continuous monitoring, improving coverage while returning clinical staff to clinical work.

The cautionary tale on the other side of the ledger is equally public: a VA real-time locating system program valued at more than half a billion dollars was terminated after roughly $431 million had been obligated with no accepted, functioning solution, its mismanagement documented in a VA Office of Inspector General review. In life-safety applications, the choice of underlying technology and implementation discipline is not a technical detail. It is the difference between a system that performs during an emergency and one that becomes the subject of an audit.

The Technology, in Plain English

Most locating platforms bet everything on a single wireless technology, usually one designed for data networking rather than life-safety. SecurTRAK puts three complementary technologies in every patient tag, each doing the job it is physically best at.

433 MHz active RFID is the backbone. The frequency was chosen for one property above all: it penetrates interior walls and floors and carries across open ground. That is what makes genuine outdoor coverage possible without blanketing a campus in networking equipment, so the same tag stays visible from a basement corridor to the far edge of a parking lot.
Diffused infrared provides room-level certainty. Infrared light cannot pass through walls, so an infrared reading is not an estimate, it is proof. When the console shows a patient in Room 214, the patient is in Room 214, not “probably somewhere on that wing.” In an elopement response, the difference between certainty and inference is the difference between walking to a room and searching a floor.
125 kHz low-frequency exciters guard the transitions. Mounted at doors, gates, and elevators, they detect a tagged patient the instant they reach a chokepoint, the moment when a locked door, a held elevator, or a called-up camera can still change the outcome.

All of it runs on a dedicated, hardwired life-safety network rather than shared hospital Wi-Fi, and patient tags operate for a minimum of two years on a battery, with no nightly charging carts and no dead badges at 3 a.m.

Seven Questions to Ask Any Elopement Prevention Vendor, Including Us

MGM encourages facilities to put every vendor, MGM included, through the same seven questions:

After a door alarm, can your system show the patient’s live location outside the building, on your map?
Is outdoor coverage the same tag and the same console as indoor coverage, or a separate add-on with its own screen for staff to remember during an emergency?
What exactly happens to alerts during a Wi-Fi or IT network outage, or a scheduled maintenance window?
Is your room-level location certain, or inferred from signal strength?
When an alert fires, can the building itself respond, doors locking, elevators holding, cameras called up, Nurse Call notified, or does the response depend entirely on whoever hears the alarm?
Can the same infrastructure carry staff duress and infant security, or is each protection a separate purchase with a separate network?
How many campus-wide, not single-building, deployments can you reference, and how long have they been running?

“A facility that asks those seven questions will end up with the right system, whoever they buy it from,” Maurer said. “We publish them because we are comfortable with our answers.”

A Standard of Care, Not a Product Pitch

The full framework appears in MGM’s plain-English guide, “Campus-Wide Elopement Prevention: Why Indoor-Only Systems Leave Patients at Risk,” available at mgm-solutions.com.

Facilities can see the platform in action on the MGM Solutions YouTube channel at youtube.com/@SecurTRAK, or arrange a live demonstration with the engineers who design, build, and install the system. MGM does not route prospective customers through call centers or resellers.

The same infrastructure that protects patients also supports wireless staff duress, infant security, and, as an operational bonus many facilities add later, real-time asset tracking, all without additional networks to purchase or maintain.

About MGM Solutions

M.G.M. Computer System, Inc. (dba MGM Solutions), founded in 1987, is an SBA-certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) and the developer of the SecurTRAK life-safety RTLS platform. MGM has delivered patient-tracking systems in hospitals since 1993 and real-time locating systems in U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs medical centers since 2002, including 40+ VA projects as prime contractor, with 99.8% uptime. SecurTRAK delivers patient elopement prevention, staff duress, infant security, and asset tracking indoors AND outdoors on a single infrastructure. Learn more at mgm-solutions.com.

Media and Sales Contact: MGM Solutions, Paulsboro, New Jersey. sales@mgm-solutions.com | (856) 371-3764