Hospital wayfinding is one of the latest digital solutions to support hospital visitor experience and patient satisfaction. It improves the patients’ access to care and provides the experience they have come to expect. It is also becoming an important tool for staff members to help navigate their daily activities.

[header image courtesy by: ivars krutainis]

What is hospital wayfinding?

There is always an urgency for patients and staff members to move quickly and efficiently through the buildings and across healthcare campuses. The problem is that hospitals can feel like complex mazes. Patients and staff alike are often confused about where to go next and how to get there.

Hospital wayfinding solutions offer a smart way to guide patients through the hospital campus with the least amount of confusion or frustration.

Hospital wayfinding app

A mobile wayfinding app provides a digital hospital map with critical points of interest, allowing users to navigate the hospital in real-time. It keeps patients, caregivers, and visitors safer and happier. This can result great benefits to hospitals, more favorable ranking among peers and fewer missed appointments.

Wayfinding app uses low energy Bluetooth beacons located throughout the facility. This network of beacon signals, detected by smartphones, provides step-by-step directions to the destination on the campus such as doctor’s office, cafeteria, lab, parking lot, and more.

Implementing a wayfinding with beacons is quite simple process. Following image describes this process in three stages.

Guiding visitors and patients to the right door

Finding the right room, the right department, entrance door or parking lot, can be stressful — even more so when the health of a friend or family member is in question. In a two million square feet hospital campus it makes all the difference knowing exactly where you are and where you are going. Being able to accurately locate yourself in real-time can be a relief to everyone.

For instance, a patient might have three appointments in different buildings on the same day. Getting from building to building through the right doors, can be just as important as navigating inside the building.

Using the hospital wayfinding app can start already before the visit. When patients receive text reminders about their upcoming appointments or procedures, embedded in that message will be a link to the wayfinding campus maps with customizable directions.

It is important to note that a successful wayfinding program provides tools across various media at every point in the visitor’s journey. For example, some visitors prefer to navigate with a mobile app, while others choose to follow step-by-step directions printed out from a computer screen, or maybe use the information kiosk at the hospital lobby. An integrated wayfinding system provides all these options to help people navigate in whatever manner they prefer.

Helping staff to find and book the available exam room

The hospital wayfinding app is also a tool to increase operational efficiency by guiding the staff in finding the location and availability of critical resources.

Some hospitals use wayfinding apps in combination with room occupancy sensors. With such an integrated system the staff members can visually see on the campus map where the available exam rooms and outpatient rooms are located. The same mobile app can also support booking the room with one click, without first speaking with the admin office or nursing desk.

More advanced room occupancy sensors can also count the number of people in the room at any moment. This information can be displayed on the hospital map with the percentage value for how much room capacity is available. Historical occupancy reports can also provide insights to the utilization of any given room or exam space over time.

Key components of a hospital wayfinding app

A modern hospital wayfinding app looks like a Google-style mapping tool. It is simple and easy to use for the patient or visitor. It shows the current location with a blue dot on the map. It provides the user with turn-by-turn directions to the destination, between parking lots, interconnected buildings, hospital corridors, and rooms.

Best of breed hospital wayfinding apps include these basic functionalities and features:

Interactive 3D digital map, that should be
- Easy to convert from multiple CAD drawings to single online wayfinding digital campus map, and easy to update with any changes in CAD drawings
- Easy to edit and maintain, by the hospital admin team, to keep all information up to date, including new points of interest, critical resources, room status flags, and more.
- Indoor and outdoor blue-dot location, enabled by Integrated global x/y coordinates with seamless transition from GPS to indoor maps
Occupancy detection and room availability status;
- Occupancy sensors integrated with the wayfinding functions that
- Show occupied and non-occupied rooms and areas, with an option to use mobile booking for available rooms
Easy to install indoor beacons, that
- Will not require any field calibration during installation, which makes the installation of potentially thousands of beacons easy and affordable
- Is optional and not always required, if a web-app based wayfinding, without beacons and blue-dot, is acceptable
Feedback button, that
- Enables patients, visitors and staff to provide feedback and personal experience about any specific hospital space, waiting room, exam room, and share improvement ideas.

Hospital wayfinding signage goes digital

Clear and easy to understand instructions should be the starting point of the digital wayfinding solution. For example, using images and photos from the physical signage helps users in connecting the mobile app to the physical space.

On the hospital wayfinding map, the “point of interest” (POI), functions as the modern-day wayfinding signage. For the hospital staff, it should be easy to edit and keep these POIs up to date, as they are the keywords and images used daily for searching and finding the things, people, and directions.

Steerpath Hospital Wayfinding App

Steerpath wayfinding platform is a comprehensive wayfinding solution for all modern hospitals. Steerpath digital campus platform is already deployed from a single building to a complex multi-million sq. ft. environments. Typically, the installation of the Steerpath wayfinding solution on the hospital website takes only 2-6 weeks.

Steerpath’s indoor positioning with BLE beacons does not require any network connectivity nor wiring. It works independently from enterprise IT networks across the campus, and it is designed for easy installation with zero calibration or expertise. Integration with existing RTLS, EHR, and other HIT and facility solutions are available through flexible API interfaces.

For more information about Steerpath Smart Hospital solutions please Contact us. In order to book a 30 min online demo to demonstrate Steerpath wayfinding in action, contact our sales at sales@steerpath.com.