Digital signage shines brightest when the organization understands their audience. Most public-facing customers leverage digital signage as an efficient means of advertising their goods or services to the “consumer,” which exemplifies the power that targeted content on digital displays brings to retail and hospitality environments.
Private organizations generally use digital signage to communicate both general and important messages to those on the inside. Examples include enterprise businesses that use digital signage to establish a corporate culture, or schools and universities that use digital signage to keep students and faculty informed of changing classroom schedules and upcoming campus events.
However, it’s challenging to think of a vertical where digital signage, when done right, makes as strong an impact to both external and internal audiences as in healthcare. Considering the often-overwhelming stress that staff, patients and visitors carry within the healthcare environment, building a digital signage strategy requires thoughtful consideration that balances the desire to be efficient and informative with a sensibility that maintains existing trust.
That means fostering a sense of ease and well being is key to creating engagement and loyalty for patients, visitors, medical staff, technicians and administrative staff, and can even extend to the donors and patrons that help to fund the healthcare provider’s future practices and initiatives.
On the outside
The healthcare industry really is based on trust — people feel like a particular hospital or clinic is a “good” one, and when they find a doctor they like, they tend to stay with them. In the hotel industry, it’s a well-known axiom that a guest’s impression of a place is made in the first 10 minutes – the same is true for a healthcare venue.
Many people enter a hospital or clinic with serious matters on their minds, which ups the ante for visibility. People may walk into a dynamic retail environment ready to engage with their surroundings and absorb the sights. But walking into a healthcare scenario is quite different, and engagement with surroundings is not always on the minds of people who might be in deep thought with a sense of worry or urgency.
For patients and visitors, it’s crucial to make screens noticeable throughout all foot-traffic areas, with sight-level signs mounted in lobbies, waiting rooms, cafeterias and elevator banks. The content also has to be fresh and interesting. Follow basic design tips and include movement of some sort to draw the eye to screens. Things like date, time and weather, or even news feeds can get people to start looking and eventually, if they spend enough time in your facility, start checking in with the screens regularly.
Consider how digital signage can improve the overall patient and visitor experience:
Wayfinding
Visitors probably need to get to a specific place to see a specific person, and many healthcare facilities are often sprawling. Help reduce people’s stress by helping them get to where they need to go quickly and efficiently. A well-designed wayfinding system not only enhances the visitor experience, but also boosts loyalty while saving time and money for staff and the organization. You can even adapt an existing digital signage system to include wayfinding – all you need is an interactive screen with a hot spot that flips the display into wayfinding mode.
Consider the following when planning out your wayfinding:
- Placement: Signs need to be in the right place, in clear view, before or at the point where the visitor has to make a decision (like “go left” or “go right”). Putting a sign after such a decision point, or in a place that’s not clear to see, causes confusion and frustration.
- Navigation: Your wayfinding design needs to be clear and easy to use. Cluttering the screen with too much information (icons, map details, etc.) can be confusing. Directories that tie to map locations should list staff, departments, events and other categories intuitively and offer a quick search feature.
- User Types : Wayfinding isn’t necessarily one-scheme-fits-all. Different people will look for different things. People with children, or in wheelchairs, will have different priorities when entering a healthcare facility, and patients and visitors will also have different needs.
These problems can all be solved with good digital wayfinding. Mounted displays showing staff and department directories, schedules and maps placed at optimal heights and angles let people see them as they go past. Interactive touchscreens and kiosks can be placed at entry and gathering points, and must meet ADA requirements.
Donor boards
Interactive donor boards let people who give to your institution present far more to your audience than just who they are and how much they donated. Bios, short videos and testimonials can be included (not just about the donors themselves, but what their money was used for), as well as prompts to encourage further giving.
Waiting rooms
One thing a lot of people do at hospitals is wait. Your digital signs can reduce perceived wait times – not the actual amount of time spent waiting, but the perception of it. When people see a queuing system or a countdown of how long they have left to wait, they feel more in control and so feel less anxiety. Rotate gift shop ads, cafeteria promos and entertainment feeds to help them pass the time without realizing it.
Offices, cafeterias
Target your messages to the right audience, beginning with offices and areas where staff congregate. The break room is the best place to reach nurses and rotational staff that come and go through the week on a less consistent schedule. It’s also helpful to leverage scheduling and dayparting tools that show different messages on different screens at different times of the day or days of the week.
Almost all staff will eventually find themselves in the cafeteria. Instead of static messages about available refreshments, a digital menu board that includes more information is both more helpful and more engaging. This can include allergy and nutritional information, and even tie into your inventory software, so people know if an item is almost sold out.
Digital signage in the cafeteria can also bring visitors and staff closer together. For visitors, advertising daily specials in the cafeteria, showing staff or department bios, augmenting your queuing system and recognizing patrons are all further ways digital signage can create a more well-rounded experience for people. Adding interactive touchscreens extends these experiences even further.
Also consider how digital signage can support the following internal needs for staff:
Safety: Although there are usually rigorous procedures in place to ensure staff safety, your digital signage can augment this by doubling as an alert system. Screens can be taken over to flash emergency alerts when events like severe weather threaten your facility.
Belonging: Use your digital signage to create a sense of community. Showing daily announcements, room schedules, facility updates and other internal information lets everyone feel that they’re working in an environment of transparency and openness, and keeps everyone informed and up to date. Show employee spotlights, welcome messages for new employees, and historical facts and overviews. This lets people feel more connected to coworkers and reminds them that they’re part of something larger.
Self-improvement: Using digital signs to inform your staff of training opportunities gives them an avenue for self-advancement and makes them feel like they work for a place that sees them as a valuable resource. Posting internal job openings and opportunities for advancement, certifications or accreditations also feeds the desire to grow their careers. All of this creates a feeling of security, higher staff morale and overall contentment.
Meetings
Whether it’s an admin meeting, staff training or patient education, you need to manage your rooms efficiently. Extending your digital signage system to meeting areas can help. Mounting hospital room signs tied into scheduling systems outside shared spaces, like conference rooms and labs, makes finding a meeting or an open room much easier. The more info you can give, the more at ease everyone on the inside and outside will be.
Conclusion
We could go much further down the road exploring opportunities to bring digital signage into patient rooms, chapels, and outdoor areas among other gathering spaces.
There are also unique opportunities to develop programs through your digital signage supplier’s creative teams, as we have done with Boston Medical Group to keep visitors informed of wait times.
Healthcare digital signage offers a broad spectrum of opportunities to communicate information and share content meaningful to an audience that is truly unique to all other verticals.
(February 27, 2025). Debbie Wilson-DeWitt — Marketing Communications Manager, Visix, Inc.. Retrieved from https://www.digitalsignagetoday.com/blogs/digital-signage-showing-signs-of-life-for-healthcare-facilities/