Navigating particularly large venues such as hospitals can prove difficult even in the places with the clearest signage.
With the work of Purple collaborating with Allina Health, this hospital has implemented wayfinding into its current app, in an effort to improve overall efficiency.
The 2.7 million square foot hospital campus offers an indoor wayfinding app that allows patients, staff, and visitors to navigate the indoors using their mobiles, providing a familiar blue dot experience.
Abbott Northwestern Hospital vice president for operations Tony LaCroix-Dalluhn commented on the new solution.
“Finding your way to a destination on the Abbott Northwestern campus can sometimes be a confusing experience, even for staff sometimes,”.
“We have signs posted in the hospital to let folks know about the wayfinding tool, so even if they don’t already have the Allina Health app when they get to the hospital, they can download it in just a few moments and be on their way.”
The interactive wayfinding app is the latest in a series of digital experience innovations Allina Health has implemented to ensure visitors can easily access and navigate their network of hospital services by enabling users to:
- See turn-by-turn directions: Blue dot guidance showing your exact location within five feet on an interactive map.
- Use search functionality by department/service, rooms, elevators, restrooms, food and dining, and more inpatient care areas.
- Be automatically re-routed if they go off track or if an elevator is closed for maintenance.
- Estimated walking time and distance.
Already the project has proven success during its beta testing stage with patients and guests reporting positive experiences with an average star rating of 4.6 out of 5.
Upcoming phases will expand Purple’s wayfinding app to Allina’s broader network. All with the intention of reducing friction for patients in healthcare so they can focus on getting better and being well.
Chris DuFresne, the Allina Director of Digital Experience noted how easy it was to work with Purple:
“We selected LogicJunction (now Purple WiFi) due to their flexibility to meet our needs with their platform, including embedding their wayfinding code base into our Allina Health mobile app to prevent users from having to download a separate mobile app.”
Further commenting on Purple’s technology for this project:
“It’s important to select a vendor that can enable the functionality without access to WiFi and cellular data once the experience loads are key since hospitals are often older buildings with interference that can impact data connectivity”
The Purple wayfinding app has already achieved notable success with blue dot navigation application implementation across the United States, like Summa Health System, University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.