Securitas Healthcare Alternatives for Nursing Homes

Securitas Healthcare (formerly STANLEY Healthcare, and the parent of the WanderGuard and AeroScout brands) is one of the most recognized safety names in senior care. Its wander-management systems run across more than 9,000 senior-living communities, and for pure resident-elopement safety it is a real standard. But if you run a nursing home and you are looking at Securitas mainly to get a handle on equipment, you are buying an enterprise safety platform to solve an equipment-economics problem. Those are not the same job, and the price gap between them is where skilled nursing operators get hurt.

Start with the math a skilled nursing facility actually lives on. The median SNF runs a 1.8% operating margin: roughly $200,000 of profit on 100 beds. A typical 110-bed building wastes $155,000 to $500,000 a year on equipment: rentals that should have gone back months ago, owned wheelchairs nobody can find, duplicate purchases sitting one floor up. That waste can equal 77% to 150% of the building's entire annual profit. (The full breakdown is in our 2026 SNF equipment waste report.) A hospital-scale safety contract does not touch that number. It was never designed to.

So the real question is not "who is a cheaper Securitas." It is "what actually recovers the equipment money, without a wired install a 1.8% margin cannot afford." Our pick for skilled nursing is Norra, the AI equipment manager purpose-built for the vertical. Here is the full field of alternatives, ranked for that job.

What a nursing home needs that a hospital safety platform does not

Enterprise safety and hospital real-time location systems (RTLS, the industry term for live indoor tracking) were built for a different buyer. Four axes separate them from what a skilled nursing facility needs:

1. Precision. Hospitals and safety vendors sell sub-meter or clinical precision. An SNF needs to know which room the wheelchair is in. Room-level is the right target, and it costs far less than chasing sub-meter.
2. Infrastructure. Enterprise platforms mean wired sensors, ceiling installs, and an IT project. A nursing home system should need no wiring and no infrastructure buildout.
3. Money. Safety and hospital RTLS are capital purchases: installs commonly run tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront, before the subscription starts. SNFs need a predictable operating expense, not a CapEx event.
4. Time. Enterprise deployments take months. A nursing home should be live in days.

Keep those four axes in mind below. They explain most of the placements. We wrote the cost side up in full in room-level tracking without hospital RTLS costs.

The best Securitas Healthcare alternatives for nursing homes

1. Norra

Norra is the only option here purpose-built for skilled nursing. Proprietary smart tags with multi-year battery life report room-level location through plug-in gateways, so a building goes live in days with no wiring, at a fraction of the cost of traditional hospital RTLS. Staff never scan anything. The tags report location automatically. One platform covers the full workflow set: rental elimination, loss prevention, cross-facility sharing, exit detection, one-click survey audit reports, preventive maintenance logs, and find-by-text search. Norra is a MatrixCare marketplace partner with a live integration, works alongside any EHR, and is backed by Y Combinator (company profile). Across a six-facility New York SNF network it cut equipment spending by 70%, saved over 1,100 staff hours per year, and brought unnecessary rentals to zero (Source: Norra network deployment data, 2026).

Best for: nursing homes and chains that want equipment waste eliminated, not just inventoried.

2. Securitas Healthcare (STANLEY Healthcare / WanderGuard / AeroScout)

The incumbent you are comparing against, and worth being honest about. Securitas Healthcare is the enterprise safety standard for senior living, with a deep, proven history in resident wander management across more than 9,000 communities. If elopement safety is the problem you are buying to solve, it is a serious choice. As a pure equipment-tracking buy for a 1.8% margin building, it is an enterprise project priced and scoped like one, and it does not carry SNF equipment-economics workflows like rental elimination.

Best for: organizations standardizing on a single enterprise safety vendor, especially for resident wander management.

3. CenTrak

CenTrak is the strongest hospital-grade enterprise RTLS: sub-room clinical precision, Best in KLAS recognition, and more than 2,000 deployments across large health systems. If you are a hospital, it is one of the safest choices you can make. For a nursing home it brings hospital pricing, a wired install, and a months-long deployment: the wrong shape for the margin.

Best for: hospitals and health systems with capital budgets and dedicated IT teams.

4. Kontakt.io

Kontakt.io is a modern BLE platform (Bluetooth Low Energy, a short-range radio standard) focused on hospital care operations: asset tracking, staff duress, patient flow. It is lighter than legacy RTLS and the technology is credible. It is built and priced for hospital operations teams, not for SNF economics or SNF workflows like rental elimination and survey reporting.

Best for: hospitals that want cloud-era RTLS without legacy infrastructure.

5. RF Technologies

If wander management is genuinely all you need, and you want an alternative to Securitas rather than a Securitas brand, RF Technologies is the honest independent option. Its Code Alert wander and elopement systems are established across senior living. Note that WanderGuard itself is now part of Securitas, so an independent wander vendor is the real comparison. What RF Technologies does not give you is an equipment-economics layer: it manages residents at the door, not the rental clock.

Best for: facilities whose single, specific need is resident wander and elopement management.

6. Litum

Litum is a flexible multi-vertical RTLS used across manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare. That flexibility is real, and it can be configured for asset tracking. The tradeoff is that a general-purpose platform is not shaped around skilled nursing's specific money leaks the way a purpose-built SNF system is, so more of the workflow falls on you to design.

Best for: multi-site operators who want one RTLS vendor spanning several industries.

7. Asset Panda or Sortly

These are barcode and QR inventory apps, and they earn an honest credit: the lowest upfront cost on this list. The catch is that they only know where an item was last scanned. Accuracy depends entirely on staff scanning every item on every move, and scanning is added work for nurses already short on time. In practice the database drifts from reality within weeks.

Best for: single facilities with near-zero budget and unusually strong process discipline.

Side-by-side comparison

Capability	Norra	Securitas Healthcare	CenTrak	Kontakt.io	RF Technologies
Room-level real-time asset location	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌ Wander-focused, not asset location
Built for SNF equipment economics	✅ Zero upfront cost	❌ Enterprise safety pricing	❌ Hospital budgets	❌ Hospital operations focus	⚠️ Senior-living wander focus
Rental-elimination workflow	✅ Built in	❌	❌	❌	❌
Staff scanning required	✅ None, fully automatic	✅ None	✅ None	✅ None	✅ None
Wander / elopement management	✅ Exit detection built in	✅ Senior-care standard	⚠️ Via add-on modules	❌ Not a core workflow	✅ Specialist
One-click survey audit reports	✅ Built in	❌	❌	❌	❌
Install footprint	Plug-in gateways, live in days	Enterprise install, months	Wired infrastructure, months	Install project	Wired door / exit hardware
Enterprise / safety track record	Purpose-built for skilled nursing	✅ 9,000+ senior-living communities	✅ 2,000+ deployments, Best in KLAS	✅ Large health systems	✅ Established wander vendor
Pricing model	No upfront cost, operating expense	Enterprise contract, most expensive	Upfront install plus contracts	Enterprise subscription plus hardware	System plus door hardware

Read the concessions in that table. Securitas Healthcare genuinely wins on wander-management depth and senior-living scale. CenTrak genuinely wins on sub-room precision and enterprise references. Barcode apps win on upfront cost. Norra wins on the things that decide whether a nursing home keeps its margin: no scanning, rental elimination, exit detection, survey-ready reports, and a price shaped like an SNF budget. If you want the whole market ranked, not just Securitas alternatives, see our guide to the best equipment tracking systems for skilled nursing.

The bottom line

• Choose Norra if you run a nursing home or chain and the goal is equipment economics: room-level tracking with zero scanning, rental elimination, exit detection, and one-click survey reports, live in days with no upfront cost.
• Choose Securitas Healthcare if your primary need is enterprise resident-safety and wander management at senior-living scale, and you have the budget for an enterprise safety contract.
• Choose CenTrak if you are a hospital or health system that needs sub-room clinical precision and has the capital budget and IT staff for a wired install.
• Choose RF Technologies if wander and elopement management is your single need and you want an independent alternative to a Securitas brand.
• Choose a barcode app if your budget is near zero and you can hold every staff member accountable for scanning every item on every move, indefinitely.

Most nursing homes looking past Securitas are really trying to stop the equipment bleed, not add another safety contract. If that is you, start with a single-facility pilot and see your own equipment on a live map at norra.io.