9 ways digital signs can improve your hospital

By SONIFI Health

January 8, 2020

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If you have a crowded bulletin board in your staff break rooms, taped-up flyers in your waiting rooms, and paperwork hastily clipped in your hallways and nursing stations, it’s time to rethink how you communicate with people in your hospital.

Printed pieces can easily be overlooked and quickly become outdated. Marketing collateral need to be replaced with every new campaign. Static artwork in waiting rooms does little to effectively distract worried families. Sloppy handwriting or a missed alert can compromise your patients’ safety.

When you shift your signage to a digital platform, your team will have easy ways to update what you communicate, who you communicate it to, when and where you need to communicate it.

Here are 9 common types of content digital signs can help you distribute in a streamlined, cost-effective and fully integrated way throughout your hospital:

Directories and wayfinding
Your location likely has lots of units and hallways for people to navigate. Save them — and your staff — time and frustration¹ by easily guiding visitors where they need to go with dynamic wayfinding signs.
Population health
Post reminders about the importance of vaccines, screenings, community health initiatives or seasonal safety tips throughout the year.
Staff communication
In employee break rooms and lounges, digital signs can be used to remind them about policy updates or upcoming events, recognize² outstanding performance and service, encourage screening and vaccination conversations with patients, and offer motivational, educational and helpful messages.
Temporary alerts
Refresh screens with announcements about visitor restrictions, construction relocations, holiday hours or paths to safety during an emergency situation.
Patient information
Where it’s appropriate in your hospital, digital signs can display a patient’s status to waiting family members, as well as clearly inform your staff of details from the patient’s EHR that can ensure continued success with your quality, safety and patient experience benchmarks.
Intentional ambience
A video display of a natural environment with soothing sounds can create calming spaces in your hospital to help visitors manage anxiety and stress.³
Cafeteria menus
An integration with your point-of-sale system can automatically display available options, along with prices, nutritional information and dietary notes.
Organization information
Waiting rooms, lobbies and other common areas are great places to use screens to advertise services, share messages from leadership, promote events and increase brand awareness⁴ with consistent messaging and imagery.
Donor recognition
Create a beautiful display with names, videos, images or biographies that honors your benefactors in a way they would appreciate most. A digital donor wall lets you quickly update and reformat the display as you receive new gifts.

Whether it’s a touchscreen, video or integrated display, digital signs can be a valuable addition to your hospital.

Each digital endpoint can be updated as often as you need to best communicate with your visitors, patients and employees.

A digital signage solution can ensure consistent messaging and branding throughout your building or health system — delivering content automatically, dynamically and intentionally to the people who need it most.

Want to learn more about how your hospital can improve patient, visitor and staff experience with strategic digital signage?

Join us on January 29 for a free webinar, “Connect with visitors, calm patients and inform staff: Why your hospital’s signage strategy should go digital.”