The most rewarding digital signage solution is the one that makes a difference. If you’ve ever been to a hospital that’s digital signage savvy, then you’ll know the great effect a stellar signage system can have. Whether it’s wayfinding that helps you get to your family more quickly, entertainment for a bored teenager, or a system for best practice guides and reassuring messages. All contribute to a better patient experience, make wayfinding easy and allow nurses and doctors to do the best job possible. The result? More relaxed patients, improved treatment procedures, and fewer mistakes. All true benefits, are worth their weight in gold to your healthcare institution.
Here are a few of the benefits of adding great digital signage in healthcare:
Digital waiting times
Visit a hospital with a digital board displaying waiting time and it already removes the anxiety that comes with not knowing how long you may be sitting there, putting the patient back in control. This also frees up areas, as patients can wait in a ‘holding area’, a cafe, or an onsite restaurant up until minutes before their appointment. This is a much nicer experience than sitting for hours staring at the same wall chart, yet doesn’t require any manpower to organize.
Wayfinding directories
Hospitals are often so sprawling with buildings, rooms, and secret passageways (or at least that’s how it feels) that it can be difficult even for doctors to get to where they need to be on time. Wayfinding through digital screens allows people to master directions fast, helping to combat confusion and save time wasted on late appointments. Placed at strategic positions throughout the hospital, a wayfinding system of screens is also a great tool for providing an emergency status update. Perhaps a doctor needs summoning ASAP, or there’s an area that needs to be evacuated in an emergency. Your screen system is already in place, ready and waiting to deliver your most important messages, potentially preventing a panicked stampede.
Patient room signage
Signage within patient rooms helps eradicate the endless boredom of most hospital environments. This could include games, TV channels, and film rentals, then a dashboard of useful information, updates on the status of the doctor, healthcare tips, and more useful information that the patient would be interested to see. Perhaps even a countdown until they get to go home! (You get the idea).
Flipping this over, signage outside patient rooms can clearly display who is there, the time they need their next medication dose, and any other information for doctors or nurses to peruse. This is the perfect place for a smaller mounted tablet screen on a secure kiosk, therefore saving on the cost of screens within a fixed solution.
Providing education
No one wants to be preached to about their healthcare - especially when they’re already in the hospital. But the screens in your digital signage solution could be used to provide useful, entertaining or genuinely educational material of interest to patients and visitors. For example, a short video that takes immobile patients through some of the exercises they can do from their chair or a recap of the choices available to them throughout their care. The screens could even provide reassurance on the number of patients admitted, anesthetics administered, and babies born, to reassure patients, make them feel part of a community, and reduce stress within the wings.
Promotion
One of the methods that make digital signage solutions more affordable for mass-scale hospital rollout is having an advertising strategy in place. Having said that, providing targeted, relevant ads to patients and visitors can provide mutual benefit to all parties involved and can finance other hospital developments or initiatives. According to surveys, 75 percent of those viewing a digital sign in a hospital could recall at least one message. Furthermore, digital signage can cut perceived wait time by up to 35 percent which can only be a good thing for patients and staff alike!
Another way to make your healthcare digital signage work harder is to use it as a way of displaying donor walls, which recognize the hospital’s financial supporters. Digital donor walls allow you to display so much more information than traditional walls and can be updated by the day. This could include photos of donors, testimonials, and URLs to their businesses or foundations.
Compliance guides
The minds of nurses and doctors must be filled with information, making retaining knowledge of every compliance procedure or guideline tough work! Digital signage solutions can help them out, providing guidelines at strategic points, within staff rooms and office banks, and helping doctors and nurses to stay on top of training while they work.
The key to achieving huge digital signage screen rollouts within hospitals and healthcare is ensuring that the implementation is easy.
