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Improving Patient Experience and Employee Efficiency in Healthcare Using Indoor Maps

Odds are that when you need to navigate to a place you’ve never been to before, you pull out your phone, type the address into a mapping application, like Google Maps, and follow the directions. What if you could continue that Google Maps experience all the way to your meeting or appointment as well?

That’s where indoor mapping comes in. What are indoor maps and how do they work? To put it simply, indoor mapping gives you the ability to navigate inside of a building to a specific room in a similar experience to using Google Maps for navigation from your house to a nearby restaurant. The technology involves taking CAD or PDF files of buildings and digitizing them. Once this process is completed, you receive two outputs. The digitized floor plans live in a progressive web or mobile app and a content management system for managing the workspace.

Two common stories have been unfolding with customers in the healthcare space around this technology. One is focused on improving the patient experience, which is becoming increasingly important for health providers, and the second is around helping hospital employees better manage the facility.

Improving the Patient Experience

The first is focused on the patient experience. When patients enter a large hospital, sometimes it can be difficult to navigate multiple floors and sub-offices to find the area where they need to check in for their appointment. This use case is based around the home-to-appointment experience, which allows a patient to locate the exact location of their doctor within a hospital. Then, once the location has been identified, the patient can easily navigate to that office from their current location. The options shown mirror the outdoor navigation options in Google Maps by offering multiple modes of transportation and turn-by-turn directions. This helps patients get where they need to be when they need to be there and allows providers to stick to tight daily appointment schedules.

Managing Facilities More Efficiently

The second indoor mapping example relevant to healthcare providers involves helping employees of a hospital more effectively navigate and manage the space. Healthcare providers often have large workspaces with many different types of valuable equipment located throughout the building, or in multiple buildings. This use case enables employees who are constantly coming and going to navigate the workspace and manage these different pieces of equipment. With indoor maps, these pieces of equipment can be visualized, with their exact location plotted on the map. This use case also ties in well with the content management system provided in the solution

The content management system makes it easy to manage the entire digitized floor plan. It enables you to customize the routes that users take, the color palette used, and the names and labels of the rooms listed. Many of the customers we have worked with currently handle this process either in a large excel sheet or even on a physical map of the location. The CMS eliminates this process and makes it easier for your facilities team to manage everything in a visual, user-friendly tool.   

As healthcare providers focus more and more on improving the patient experience, indoor mapping offers a clear solution to quell navigation frustrations. Indoor navigation enables providers to create a positive initial impression to the patient, whether they’re a first-time patient or a family member coming to see a loved one. Similarly, indoor mapping can enable employees to find their way around a large workplace and locate the machines they need quickly to do their job more efficiently. Giving the user the ability to get where they’re going on time in a massive facility not only brings monetary value to the health system but can also take a lot of anxiety out of the overall patient experience.

Are you interested in learning more about how indoor mapping can work in your healthcare system? Contact us now to speak with our experts.

About the Author

Kylie McKee
Kylie McKee is a Content Marketing Strategist at Maven Wave with more than eight years of tech industry experience and five years of content marketing experience. Prior to joining the Maven Wave team, Kylie worked as a Content Marketing Specialist for WebPT, Inc. and earned an Associate in Applied Science in Motion Picture, Television, and New Media Production with a CCL in Screenwriting from Scottsdale Community College.
April 24th, 2019
HEALTHCARE

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2020-03-13T10:14:45-05:00