Hospitals are difficult to find your way around, with miles of near-identical corridors leading to door after door of similarly-named wards and treatment rooms. Strict hygiene requirements mean decor must be kept to a minimum, and evolving needs mean rooms often change purpose at short notice. All of this leads to a navigation nightmare, making hospitals intimidating places for many patients. As hospitals grow and change, it will only get worse. Visitor and patient visiting clinics have quoted that when there is a refurbishment of even when a department is moved, the information given on directions can be patchy or even non existing.
Data from 2013 suggests that around 6.9m outpatient hospital appointments, each costing an average of £108, are missed each year in the UK. Doctors attribute a significant fraction of these to navigation problems, especially at large hospitals.
In addition to the challenges faced by patients, hospital staff are often navigating unfamiliar environments, and under serious time pressure. A typical NHS hospital has 5,000 staff members, most of whom work mainly in one physical area — even permanent staff may not be aware of the overall layout. In addition, many staff such as junior doctors, spend only a few months in a particular hospital as part of training rotations, or even less time as locums covering acute staff shortages.
This research was limited to UK teaching hospitals, so the same may not be true elsewhere. But it’s clear that at least in the UK, the current provision of navigational aids is insufficient. We found that maps are often out of date and lacking in detail, with signage comprising of an overwhelming list of destinations described in medical terms or acronyms.
Systems we use to get around outdoors don’t work. Many of these rely on GPS which, The president of the Royal Institute of Navigation, says is, “can be unreliable indoors”.
Until now,; App-based solutions for both patients and staff have been developed, using other signals like Wi-Fi and beacons which are expensive to implement as infrastructure in buildings and to scale it as a solution. Hospital visits are often unplanned, so an app that is ready to download at the door or advertised in appointment letters, hospital information and carparks would give people the opportunity download and ready. An automated system that runs in the background and is available for all hospitals gives the user confidence that there needs have been considered.
Once a persons walks through the door they have the ability to locate their destination and get augmented reality directions and information of that route which is live and up to date.
The Hospital get data on ‘who’ is in the building, ‘where’ they are and their capability to egress in an emergency. All the plans are managed on the internet by the hospital and belongs to them with the ability to instantly change, edit or give alerts.
Combine this with a free global app that can give direction in your own language and has features designed to tackle this issue of getting lost and reduces the cost of the A to B travel indoors.
author: @Baran
published on: 2018–08–10
