Wayfinding apps finding their way into hospitals

Patients wandering around lost amid the University of Alabama at Birmingham's medical campus became such a problem that in 2013 hospital officials appointed a task force to come up with solutions.

It wasn't going to be easy. The complex covered a whopping 100 city blocks with four million square feet of buildings and parking facilities. “Our main reason to care about wayfinding is to reduce the anxiety for new patients and visitors coming to campus,” said Jordan DeMoss, Senior Associate Vice President at UAB Medicine. “We serve a wide range of patients in terms of both age and socioeconomic status, so we needed a solution that provides better directional support for all.”

In any complex physical environment — not just health systems, but shopping malls, airports, and universities — an effective wayfinding system is key to visitor satisfaction. Traditional wayfinding principles include architectural cues, physical signage, and lighting.

For instance, a colorful mural in a hospital corridor can be aesthetically pleasing but also serve as a notable landmark to help orient visitors. Many hospitals use volunteers at the front desk to give directions or to walk patients to their destination.

However, a growing number of health systems — like UAB Medicine — have been attracted to technological solutions like mobile apps, touchscreen kiosks, and digital signage. These wayfinding innovations cater to younger, more tech-savvy hospital visitors.

Visix, a software development firm based outside of Atlanta, Ga., provides digital signage solutions for corporate, education, healthcare, and government facilities. Patients type in their doctor's name and a flatscreen monitor displays the best route to get there. Visix's healthcare clients include WakeMed Health & Hospitals, Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the University of Chicago Medical Center.

Other health systems are developing their own digital wayfinding technologies. In 2012, the Mayo Clinic's in-house technologies produced a free smartphone app to help patients and visitors find their way through its 59-building campus. The Mayo Clinic Patient app includes interior maps and turn-by-turn directions to any destination on campus, along with more health-focused capabilities like appointment management and lab results.

Some hospitals have added wayfinding capabilities to the touchscreen kiosks they've installed in their lobbies for patient check-in. Companies like Cary, N.C.-based PatientWorks offer health systems not only check-in but a customizable user touch screen environment with access to multilingual maps and turn-by-turn directions. Visitors can also print, email, or text themselves maps and directions directly from the kiosk.

A number of new products are offering indoor blue-dot navigation similar to Google Maps, where the blue dot represents your real-time location. Etelu, a full-service mobile web and app development company specializing in healthcare and education, has developed a customizable blue-dot navigation app that allows users to easily find a doctor, clinic, patient room, or lab.

The MediLocator App contains maps of the surrounding city, health system campus, and floors in each hospital building. Connexient, which focuses exclusively on the healthcare market, offers health systems a blue-dot navigation app called MediNav that works on smartphones, kiosks, and computers. The software's dynamic positioning is accurate to within the range of a meter or two, and turn-by-turn directions guide users through visual and audio cues.

The proliferation of new companies offering solutions has created a wayfinding problem for health systems. Which one is the best choice for their environment? Every built environment, usually the product of decades of expansions and remodeling projects, presents its own unique set of problems.

Patients and visitors differ, too. UAB Medicine was excited about a technology-driven solution, but they didn't want to alienate visitors without a smartphone or those who prefer to speak with a real human being.

“We have a sector of patients who still want paper maps, and we didn't want to leave them out,” said DeMoss. “We wanted a versatile wayfinding tool to reduce anxiety so that patients and their families have an overall better experience. Anything to make our patients get healthcare easier and with less stress is worth doing.”

Next: How one system found the right solution for its wayfinding problem.

Meeri Kim is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.