Helping Patients Navigate the 'Hospital Maze'

We've always heard laughter is the best medicine, and yet to many people hospitals today are perceived to be depressing and confusing places. They are also difficult to navigate, a labyrinth of corridors, elevators, stairways and mystery doors. Most hospitals, to their credit, have been going well out of their way to dispel this dreary environment and improve wayfinding, sometimes at great effort and cost.

Luckily, mobile wayfinding is here to help. With the vast majority of patients being on mobile, wayfinding apps are proving to be great tools for providers to solve the maze madness and to brighten up the place a bit. By incorporating geofencing and proximity beacons into their branded apps, hospitals can greatly ease the navigation process for patients and visitors. Inject a little humor into these apps, and you can bring the best medicine back into play.

Proximity beacons are small, energy-efficient Bluetooth devices that continually send out small pulses triggered by corresponding apps if a user is nearby. Placing these miniscule, low-cost devices at various points about the facility can give your hospital a new way of assisting wayward visitors.

With mobile wayfinding apps powered with geofencing and beacons, you can:

• Engage your patients with relevant location-based push messages, maps, offers, and images.

• Assist with indoor and outdoor navigation, parking, automatic check-in and queue placement, etc.

• Reduce stress levels and improve experience for patients and their families.

• Boost your brand image by incorporating a cutting-edge technology in your branded apps.

You also get the opportunity to inject some personality and brighten up the place. Here are a few examples, for the more skeptical. Place a beacon around the corner from your cafeteria. A person walks by, and the beacon's pulse interacts with your hospital app on their phone, causing the app to send that person a push notification:

“Hey, this is meatloaf calling to you. Take a right at the corner and follow your nose to the cafeteria.”

Or, at the entrance to the birth center: “Caution: Cuteness Overload! Entering the XYZ Hospital Baby Zone.”

Or, at the main entrance: “Welcome to the XYZ Hospital. Use our app to show you around. We hope you won't stay long!”

We would urge you to come up with better jokes than ours, but the key is to improve hospital wayfinding, while you humanize your organization in the process.

Making your patients and visitors feel more comfortable is crucial, and with today's mandated patient satisfaction surveys, it could have a financial impact as well.

Supplementing signage with hospital wayfinding apps (and a little humor) is a big step in the right direction. Ease of wayfinding aside, a branded hospital app powered with geofencing and beacons will boost your brand, while engaging your patients and visitors on a personal level.

Author: Janna Badalian, Marketing Director at MobileSmith

MobileSmith is an enterprise-class, flexible mobile app development platform that enables organizations to rapidly create, deploy, and manage custom, native apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android smartphones without writing a line of code. Our clients create award-winning mobile apps, easily integrate their data sources, securely manage each mobile app from a dedicated online CMS, and take advantage of proximity-based push messaging via MobileSmith/Gimbal integration.