What should health systems look for in a digital wayfinding solution?
Health systems should look for five things in a digital wayfinding solution: turnkey technology, accurate indoor positioning, flexible routing for unique patient journeys, integration with other digital tools, and dynamic content management. Together, these make wayfinding easy for patients to use and easy for the health system to maintain.
Why are health systems adding digital wayfinding?
Demand is growing. In a recent survey of healthcare executives, 40% said digital wayfinding is on their wish list of mobile offerings for patients. Three trends are driving it:
- Facilities are getting more complex. As health systems add new wings, towers and acquired facilities, patients get lost. So do staff, including providers sent to work in unfamiliar buildings, who can fall behind schedule as a result.
- Staffing and volunteer levels are down. Many health systems don’t expect to return to pre-pandemic levels, which leaves less time for staff to direct or walk patients to appointments.
- Patients prefer touchless options. Health systems that once relied on staff to personally guide every patient are finding that patients would now rather navigate on their own phones.
How has digital wayfinding worked for health systems?
The University of Tennessee Medical Center (UTMC) has a 2.5-million-square-foot campus, and patients and visitors often got lost even with volunteers stationed throughout the facility. UTMC added the UTMC Way mobile app, which navigates patients from home to parking to the point of care. Now, 61% of users have opened the app three or more times since downloading it.
“Through the use of the UTMC Way app, patients and their families can now navigate our campus using the latest wayfinding technology right on their phones,” said Michael Saad, CIO at UTMC. “This allows patients to pinpoint exactly where they’ve parked and navigate to their appointment and safely back to their car, all while using turn-by-turn directions.”
What are the five things to consider when choosing hospital wayfinding?
- Turnkey technology. Choose a partner that provides both the navigation hardware and software and doesn’t depend on other vendors. The partner should develop, install and maintain the platform, which lifts the burden off your IT team and keeps wayfinding accurate as your facilities change.
- Indoor positioning accuracy. Make sure the technology can find where a patient is indoors on its own. Many solutions ask patients to enter their location first, which frustrates people who are already lost. Others are only about 70% accurate, which leaves a lot of room for error in a large facility.
- Flexibility for any patient journey. Many patient journeys have extra steps, like stopping at registration before an MRI. Walk through your facilities and talk with staff about common wayfinding problems, so routes reflect how patients actually move through your buildings.
- Integration with other digital tools. Wayfinding can be the gateway to a larger mobile platform that brings all your patient-facing tools into one app. Patients save time and avoid confusion when one download gives them navigation, scheduling and more.
- Dynamic content management. Your content manager should be a single place to manage every location and destination in the app. It should connect to existing data sources, such as provider directories, and to live feeds like wait times, so your team doesn’t have to update the same data twice.
Where can you learn more about choosing a wayfinding vendor?
The Wayfinding Resource Hub includes a vendor evaluation worksheet, a feature checklist and deployment options for health systems evaluating digital wayfinding.
