03/19/2026
SENERGY TEAMS WITH SSM HEALTH IN SECURING NEW BEHAVIORAL HEALTH FACILITY
SSM Health recently unveiled a new behavioral health inpatient unit in Bordley Tower, on the fifth floor of St. Louis University Hospital, located at 1201 S. Grand Blvd, St. Louis, MO. The nearly 27,000-square-foot space formerly housed medical-surgical and intensive care units until its recent transformation into a much-needed behavioral health inpatient unit that unifies physical safety and a community-minded focus on therapeutic healing.
For the security component of SMM Health’s Bordley Tower behavioral health renovation project Senergy security was enlisted to design a custom security system appropriate for such a facility.
“We have a very healthy long-running partnership with SSM,” said Senergy account manager, Dylan Whicker, whose primary focus is handling SSM projects.
“We’ve been very fortunate to work with SSM’s incredible team on multiple projects involving access control, security camera systems, weapons detection and more.” SSM Health operates more than 20 hospitals and multiple clinics throughout Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. “We have developed an intuitive understanding of SSM’s evolving security concerns and needs,” Whicker said. “At this point, we can almost finish each other’s sentences.”
For the Bordley Tower Behavioral Health Inpatient Clinic in the St. Louis, Whicker said their security team focused on a layered security system approach.
“This typically involves installing special access control locking hardware to create ‘mantraps’ in vestibules, helping to eliminate patient elopement. And there’s quite a bit of backend programming work involved to enable the creation of access control special rules, permissions and schedules for the nurses’ station, med rooms and stairways. And of course, the strategic placement of security cameras to eliminate blind spots for added safety.”
The St. Louis-based architecture firm Lawrence Group designed a pod system layout for the facility consisting of four pods of 10 to 11 patient rooms each. The pods are supported by a shared core space equipped with laundry, staff break rooms and restrooms, nourishment areas and staff workspaces.
“The pod system provides better control and better patient care as the two nurses assigned to each pod are only caring for five to six patients each,” said Lawrence Group Associate Principal-Health Care Planner, Ganesh Sathyan.
Other areas in the new SSM behavioral health inpatient unit include quiet rooms, consultation rooms, medication stations and day dining rooms. Design elements such as soft curves for patient corridor walls, radiused edges on wood-look elements on the ceilings and corners of the nurses stations, tamper-resistant millwork and wall-protection printed artwork bring comforting and biophilic elements into the space.
The patient units themselves feature a dorm-like design, providing a private space with individual restrooms set off by saloon doors.
“We have a variety of projects in various stages at a number of SSM locations in the region keeping our team very busy. That’s a good thing. With SSM Health becoming such a dominate leader in the health care industry, projects are on the drawing board or at some stage of construction at all times.
“We always look forward to working with the SSM team because of their attention to detail, professionalism and understanding of health care security complexities. Frankly, that makes our job a little easier at the end of the day,” Whicker concluded.
Full story: https://www.senergy.io/security-insights/senergy-spotlight-news-report/
