Helping Patients Find Their Way at Grand River Hospital

Finding your way around a hospital can be a challenge. To make this process easier for patients and visitors, Grand River Hospital uses digital wayfinding to help them quickly and easily locate the waiting room or department they need.

Minimizing missed appointments reduces overhead administration costs and helping visitors navigate a large hospital campus increases the patient experience. Let’s find out how.

The Client

Grand River Hospital is a large community teaching hospital serving Waterloo Region, Wellington County, and Southwestern Ontario, primarily through its Kitchener-Waterloo (KW) and Freeport campuses. Thousands of people arrive at Grand River Hospital every day for medical procedures, testing, and visiting loved ones.

The Opportunity

Grand River Hospital was looking for an interactive mapping tool to simplify patient wayfinding. Their main goal was simple; make it easy for visitors and patients to find their way around their KW and Freeport campuses. They also wanted to help new volunteers familiarize themselves with the hospital and feel confident directing patients to various departments.

Moreover, Grand River Hospital wanted to make maps easily accessible by enabling visitors to self-serve and search for directions on their mobile devices or from kiosks located around the hospital.

The Wayfinding Solution

Responsive Web App: Grand River Hospital implemented Mappedin’s Responsive Web App on their website to display interactive maps for the KW Main Campus and Freeport Campus. This mobile solution enables patients and visitors to search for a location on the map and get turn-by-turn directions to different departments, waiting rooms, and services from any device.

The Web App includes wayfinding features such as smart search, category listings, floating labels, and optimized pathing, which together provide a simplified navigation experience. Patients can search for certain keywords or acronyms to locate a specific department, and can confidently navigate multiple floors and multiple buildings with only a few taps on their devices.

Digital Directories: To complete the hospital wayfinding solution, Grand River Hospital paired the Responsive Web App with Mappedin’s Digital Directories. Once launched, patients and visitors are equipped with an additional touchpoint to access directions on-site.

Map Editor: Mappedin’s Map Editor acts as a centralized management tool for Grand River Hospital to update and edit its maps as its campuses and departments change or grow. Administrators can make edits to their map on time and deploy those changes in real-time across both the Responsive Web App and Digital Directories, ensuring visitors will always be presented with the most up-to-date location information.

In addition, Grand River Hospital can update location tags and descriptions to ensure patients can easily locate the areas they need, even if they refer to them by a different name or shorthand. For instance, patients can search for a specific equipment, such as an MRI, to locate the medical imaging department that contains the MRI machine.

The Result

Grand River Hospital makes it easy for its thousands of daily visitors to familiarize themselves with its campuses, search for departments and waiting rooms, and get intuitive directions to where they need to go. Whether on-site or at home, patients are equipped with a wayfinding tool that makes it easy to pre-plan their routes or bring directions on the go.

- Daniel Lombardi, VP Donor Success & Revenue at Grand River Hospital Foundation.

Looking Forward

We continue to support Grand River Hospital and are looking forward to the launch of their Digital Directories! Visit our website to learn more about our solutions for hospitals and healthcare institutions, or contact us to get started today.