What's the #1 Thing for Hospital Wayfinding Success?

Digital wayfinding in healthcare is hard. Just look at our ongoing series on the what, why and how of wayfinding! There are so many challenges to overcome and possible tools to use. Anyone can say they navigate a patient to the point of care, but navigating to the point of care in healthcare is not the same as navigating a shopping mall.

In healthcare, there are two important pieces to consider to ensure the best experience for health consumers:

1. Getting any person from home to parking to the point of care and physically navigating a hospital with accuracy, and
2. Ensuring patients are guided through their journey correctly with alerts on where to go to check-in or rerouting to accommodate changing protocols

For these reasons, no health system should invest in a wayfinding solution without testing it onsite. In a new guide, Gozio experts share the ins and outs of successfully testing a hospital wayfinding experience. They discuss the features every solution must have, pro tips for how to try to "break" the wayfinding experience, and provide a checklist of things to do when you are onsite to make sure it provides the best experience possible.

Testing onsite is absolutely the number one thing you must do to ensure success. But before you can do that you need to narrow down your choices to the best one or two options. The guide provides a must-have feature list that should help you do just that. If the system doesn't offer these features, remove it from your list.

• Easily search, across the entire system or an individual location, to find hospitals and doctor’s offices as well as points of interest like restrooms, ATMs, or dining. Can you refine your search with filters like distance (i.e., urgent care near me or restroom near me)?
• Does it allow you to use your preferred navigation app (Google, Waze, etc.) from home to parking?
• Can it seamlessly switch from outdoor navigation to onsite/indoor navigation?
• Does it make transitions between locations within a campus (i.e., from parking to a building entrance)?
• Will it alert you if you go off route and get you back on track?
• Does it pinpoint your location and provide true blue-dot navigation (you are following the blue-dot not the other way around)?
• Can you explore a 3-D map with building and floor selection to orient to your position?

When you narrow down your options, then ask the vendors to provide a list of hospital locations you can go to so you can test onsite. Once onsite, use the checklist in this new guide, Testing Hospital Wayfinding Onsite is Key: 30 Tips to Make Sure It Really Works, to test the experience.