Hospitals can be a stressful place. Being a patient or a visitor can bring out anxious feelings. Add in the fact that hospitals are often crowded and very busy. Larger hospitals can be complex to navigate with different buildings, multiple floors, and color-coded wings. Sometimes departments are spread across multiple locations, making the path to the correct location extra challenging. Visitors and patients can be overwhelmed trying to figure out the fastest route to get to where they need to be.
Hospitals are recognizing that finding ways to improve the patient experience is a worthwhile investment. In attempting to improve the quality of care, hospitals are seeking ways to reduce patient and visitor stress. The interior of the hospital is often maze-like, leading patients and visitors to feel frantic and worried. Increased patient stress can show up as increased blood pressure, anxiety, etc., which can complicate the actual medical visit.
Improved Use of Hospital Resources
Patients often miss doctor appointments because of difficulties in navigation (known as “wayfinding”). When this happens, physicians get backed up, stress builds on patients, and hospital scheduling gets thrown off. This forces staff to scramble and readjust, and not all patients will get the time they need with their doctors.
In an ideal hospital environment, information desks are always available to help lost and nervous visitors. Unfortunately, visitors often resort to waving down physicians and nurses, instead. Having staff devote time to answering wayfinding questions takes them away from their busy jobs of seeing patients. This causes treatment delays and can be costly — as much as $220,000 per year.1
Advantages of Mobile Wayfinding
Problems navigating through large hospitals have always existed and solutions have typically been limited to rearranging signage. With the surge of smartphone usage, hospitals now can implement a wayfinding application. This allows patients and visitors to access hospital maps in the palm of their hands. Not only can these applications pinpoint the visitor’s location inside the hospital, but it can also help direct them step-by-step to their desired destination. Here are three benefits of using mobile wayfinding:
Personalization
Navigating through a large hospital is confusing. There are too many signs and too many possible directions. A mobile wayfinding option can eliminate this confusion by leading patients on a direct path to their destination.
Adaptability
Hospital environments are constantly changing — doctors’ offices move locations, elevators get shut down for repairs, and cafeterias close for remodeling. To reflect these changes on physical signage and maps can take time, money, and effort. Software can be updated at a moment’s notice — much like a hospital website. No longer will hungry visitors find their way to a cafeteria only to see it is closed for remodeling. A wayfinding platform has the ability to reassign a route that avoids the closed cafeteria.
Showcalling of Resources
Hospitals strive to help patients as much as possible. One way of doing so is by offering resources such as daycare or counseling. Mobile wayfinding applications can give hospitals the ability to showcase resources that patients may not otherwise be aware of.
Aruba Meridian
Meridian is a mobile-app software platform from Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, that allows
public-facing enterprise venues, such as hospitals, to create or improve mobile apps that engage visitors on their mobile devices. These venues can leverage Meridian to deliver location relevant information such as mapping, turn-by-turn directions, venue-specific information, and proximity-based notifications to mobile-app users during their visits.
Aruba Location Services
Aruba Location Services powered by Aruba Beacons can be added to provide an additional layer of contextual device
positioning. This real-time data integrates with Meridian powered mobile-apps to give users access to more granular
location-based services and personalized mobile engagement.
To learn more about how American Digital and Aruba wayfinding solutions can help you improve patient experiences in your healthcare facility, contact us.
1 – Georgia Tech School of Architecture, “Finding the Building in Wayfinding,” Zimring, Craig, Sept 1, 1990.
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