Safety under pressure: A conversation with Andrea Greco, SVP of healthcare safety at CENTEGIX

Workplace violence is no longer just a security problem. It is a staffing problem, a financial problem and, for many organizations, a defining question of whether clinicians feel safe enough to stay.

Medical Economics sat down with Andrea Greco, senior vice president of healthcare sales at CENTEGIX, to break down the key takeaways from the organization’s 2026 Healthcare Trends Report, and what they mean for hospitals, ambulatory sites and physician practices in 2026.

Greco breaks down how duress alerts are no longer clustered on certain days but spread across the entire week, underscoring that risk is now “any day, any time.” She explains why alerts spike during busy midmorning hours — when rounds, visitors, discharges and shift changes all collide — and how that churn can push stressed patients and families past their breaking point.

Throughout the conversation, she returns to a few core themes. For one, individual staff members are calling for help far more often than entire units, which means response models need to be immediate and discreet, not dependent on overhead codes or ad hoc support. High-risk spaces such as hallways, exam rooms and nurses’ stations need better protection and faster location-based response rather than simply more cameras or signage.

She also addresses the tension around real-time location systems, noting that many clinicians refuse tools that feel punitive or track them continuously. Adoption improves, she says, when technology is clearly framed around safety and only activated in an emergency.

Finally, she walks through the dollars-and-cents case: the cost of turnover, workers’ compensation claims, lost productivity and damaged infrastructure, and how even a small drop in incidents can justify investments in modern duress systems and violence-prevention strategies.

Her bottom line for leaders under pressure: safety planning has to be workforce-centric, financially defensible and accountable — or it will not hold.