Mobile wayfinding apps play an important role in healthcare. Google Maps and vehicle navigation systems may help you drive to a hospital, but increasingly large medical complexes remain a challenge to guide you from the parking lot to your specialist’s office suite. Healthcare wayfinding apps built on platforms such as Connexient’s MediNav may not glow with the new technology aura of nanosensors or neural networking diagnosis, but apps that help people get from point A to point B efficiently in a medical maze goes a long way to improve the patient experience.
Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (TMH) announced that the 17-county region in North Florida and South Georgia will use the Gozio Health wayfinding platform to build an app for patients and visitors. The Gozio Health app will include interactive maps with step-by-step directions to doctors’ offices, cafeterias, pharmacies, parking decks, restrooms, and other locations of interest. When the app launches, it will include driving guides from patients’ homes to the closest medical facility parking area and then step-by-step directions within the facility or complex. The initial facilities covered by the app will include Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, Tallahassee Memorial Hospital’s Women’s Pavilion, three off-site clinics and urgent care offices, and three parking decks.
Next steps for TMH’s Gozio Health app will include incorporating appointment scheduling, emergency department and urgent care wait times, and access to electronic medical records. Helping patients and visitors get to their destinations in hospitals and clinics may seem like a low tech need that has little to do with care plans or patient outcomes, but taking care of the softer, more human factors with apps such as the TMH wayfinding app will improve patient experience by removing a real-world challenge many of us feel when we try to navigate a new medical facility.
