How to Incorporate Your Healthcare Brand Into Hospital Wayfinding
Hospital wayfinding has continued to rise in popularity over the past decade, specifically as a digital resource for enhancing both the healthcare patient and employee experience alike. While these various forms of interactive navigational technology do wonders for reducing waiting room and check-in times, implementing self-service features, and adhering to ADA Accessibility standards, perhaps the most overlooked utilization of wayfinding software is the ability to seamlessly incorporate your brand into the design and usage of the system.
This integration of visual and verbal cues that blend accessibility and convenience with distinct logos, colors, and patterns helps establish a healthcare facility as a helpful resource in the eyes of their patients. To essentially break it all down, the better suited hospitals are for promoting more congenial sources of navigational and patient assistance, the more recognized, appreciated, and applauded their clinic and brand can become, allowing them to become locally synonymous with care and convenience.
But successfully incorporating your brand into proficient hospital wayfinding software takes more than merely inserting your logo wherever it's deemed necessary.
Here are a few tips to seamlessly incorporate your healthcare brand into successful and resourceful hospital wayfinding designs.
Specify Your Themes
First things first, blending your healthcare branding with wayfinding software requires defining all the design elements and themes you plan on incorporating. This doesn’t need to require any overthinking, just a basic outlining of all the colors and patterns you plan on using, as well as ensuring your logo meshes well with those chosen design schemes.
When a patient approaches a check-in kiosk in the waiting room or a digital map to find their way, you want them to essentially feel invited to use your software, through warm, vibrant colors that aren’t too elaborate, nor mundane. You want patients to see your hospital logo and accompanying colors and immediately feel a sense of comfort and trust.
This is where pairing up with a reputable creative design agency can help your clinic come up with the little interior design details that make a big difference in the overall patient experience.
Inject Personality
Perhaps the thing that gets lost the most when it comes to merging branding with wayfinding software is the failure to establish a semblance of reliability within the verbiage, design, and content used within the wayfinding technologies. This specifically is alluding to injecting a little personality into your wayfinding strategy, so patients utilizing your kiosks or digital signage will feel more comfortable and confident, rather than intimidated or unsure.
This can be achieved with occasional infusions of humor, wholesomeness, compassion; anything that can definitely establish a more inviting, relatable, and most importantly personable tone and voice into the content of your wayfinding software.
Share Your Story
Another way to add some distinction into the branding of your hospital wayfinding technologies is to tell your patients who your clinic truly is. This means personalizing your healthcare facility to your patients by incorporating digital signage that informs the reader on the overall history of the clinic they’re currently occupying.
This can be achieved through anything from a digital timeline, outlining notable moments in your hospital’s past, or a series of encouraging and noteworthy statistics. Allowing patients the opportunity to learn more about the company they’re receiving care from not only puts them more at ease, but installs a sense of trust and knowledge that influences their decision to continue utilizing your healthcare facilities.
Get Personal
In addition to allowing patients to absorb the history of your hospital, utilizing wayfinding software to highlight the staff that’s caring for them helps establish a personal connection with the patient toward your brand. Having digital signage that showcases short, enticing bios of all the doctors, nurses, and employees that occupy your clinic provides the patient with the opportunity to put faces behind the care they’re receiving.
The more of a personal connection you can establish with your patients, the stronger your branding will continue to become.
Encourage Feedback
Giving your patients an accessible and convenient opportunity to share their experience of visiting your hospital also allows for a more personalized relationship between hospital and patient to grow. Rather than email them surveys or mail them physical forms, granting them immediate and simple digital access to let their voice be heard not only provides keen insight as to how effective your wayfinding strategies are, but helps to secure a distinct, honest relationship with the patient and your brand.
Contact Oppna Digital for Creative Wayfinding Solutions
The benefits of boosting your brand through creative wayfinding strategies are seemingly infinite. If you’re interested in improving patient experiences and expanding brand awareness, Oppna Digital is here to help!
Contact us today to request a demo of our creative wayfinding solutions, or give us a call at 651-237-5677 to speak directly with one of our agency creative experts.