Hospitals are some of the busiest places – with doctors, staff, and guests all around. So, internal communication is critical in any healthcare facility. Relaying information on time to those who need it can be a matter of life and death. Healthcare digital signage can bridge the gap of swift hospital internal communication. It can shed the load from an already overtaxed infrastructure and provide a healthy experience for all.
Besides reducing perceived times and entertaining visitors in the waiting area, digital screens significantly improve hospital management, efficiency, and productivity. Let’s find out how.
Effective Tips to Use Healthcare Digital Signage Solutions for Internal Communication
1. Exclusive Information
Hospital internal communication by digital signage can act as critical, speedy reminders to the staff and employees. Communicating to dozens of workers in a chaotic environment of a hospital is no easy game. By strategically placing digital screens within the hospital, you can relay vital notes, remind events, and other staff-exclusive information. This includes communicating upcoming training or lectures, blood drives, and sponsored events. You may also add notifications about policy changes and updated processes.
Such hospital internal communication dramatically lowers down the need to schedule deliberate meetings or spread messages via other channels. This eliminates the chances of ineffective communication, which is probably over interruptive channels like pages or voice calls. A study found that hospital staff ignores around 25% of messages communicated by these devices.
Digital screens are hard to miss and easy to read and can inform a group of workers unanimously to bring all employees on the same page within seconds. Besides achieving a loop of information, it promotes healthy staff management with utmost convenience.
2. Displaying Schedules
Enhancing hospital internal communication means ensuring your staff is kept up-to-date throughout the shifts. As easy as that sounds, the reality in hospitals is different. Healthcare workers go in and out of the rooms, always on foot, and change shifts with other employees. Despite other channels conveying pop-up messages, it is worthwhile to employ big, digital screens to update schedules for the day for everyone to see.
Above all, this practice can help workers locate and connect with others. They can view their designated areas, making it easy for the visitors of the patients to pinpoint their doctors. On-the-spot updated schedules in emergencies or changes induced by the authorities can also run across all the digital screens mounted on the hospital walls. Staff who desires to communicate with certain people can easily locate and avoid unnecessary delays.
Healthcare digital signage software comes with various features to assist management in carrying out these practices. The Playlist Inheritance System allows updating the displayed content to adjust with immediate changes and run from a dedicated list. In contrast, Data Range Filter gives control over when content goes on and off.
3. Emergency Response Tool
The premium use of healthcare digital signage is its excellent capacity as an emergency response tool. Hospital signage can transmit emergency messages to staff, employees, or doctors instantaneously and simultaneously.
Digital screens are bright, editable, and wall-mounted or strategically placed such that security warnings, safety alerts, or OT emergencies can be conveyed to relevant groups almost immediately. This surpasses the need for audio messages sent across loudspeakers as the traditional method of communicating urgent content. Digital signage proves a long-term investment in sharing more than one note at any day and time. Similarly, to fetch a specific staff or healthcare worker to a particular room, digital screens can run a flashing message across the screens on the landscape to convey the order more effectively than other channels do.
In natural disaster emergencies, hospitals can use digital signage to alert everyone at once of the imminent danger. Examples of such instances include earthquakes or flooding. Subsequently, you can use it to communicate probable instructions to follow in situations as such.
4. Real-time Communication
Another aspect of hospital internal communication is informing visitors about medical treatment and surgical progress in the waiting rooms. Quite obviously, this type of hospital communication is not possible except via digital signage. Doctors carrying out the surgical procedures rarely have the time to come out and communicate with the patient’s family.
The technology is beneficial to alleviate anxiety levels and waiting time. It promotes optimum customer experience on the whole. Moreover, employing digital signage to update real-time information about operations underway eases the hospital staff’s burden who otherwise carry out the job. By conveying necessary updates like the start of the surgery, time awaited, and nearing the end, along with consoling messages to calm the family down, this is a prime example of how flexible and useful hospital signage can be.
5. Navigation
Digital signage is a handy and engaging tool for large landscapes where finding the way can be overwhelming. As another internal hospital communication strategy, digital screens can help bewildered visitors or patients navigate through the hallways to their location. Healthcare digital signage can help clear the queues, avoid crowd disruption, and encourage a seamless management system that hospitals are in dire need of.
6. Patient Registration
Healthcare institutions like hospitals can use interactive digital kiosks for patient registration to replace paper records. Patients can enter in their details, choose a facility, and register themselves on interactive kiosks to improve accuracy and ease staff burden. This can marginally increase the hospital’s productivity where patients enjoy the method and significantly reduce the time required for manual dealing. Streamlined with administration, hospital interactive signage for this purpose provides numerous benefits, including a well-regulated management system.
7. Patient Interactivity
Healthcare digital signage offers dynamic engagement in the rooms of patients to elevate internal communication further digitally. It means that patients can communicate with the hospital staff without them coming inside the space. Standard whiteboards in patient rooms demonstrating medical tests (carried out or lined up), their results, and other details relevant to the doctor and the patient, can now switch to digital screens.
Ideally, individual digital screens inside patients’ rooms can be useful to eliminate the need to update content manually. From frequently asked questions such as “What’s my doctor’s name?” or “How do I order my dinner?” to educate information such as treatment results, healthy foods/routines, scheduled check-ups, and patients can remain fully informed about their condition. Moreover, they can be continuously reminded of relevant medical education about their health progress to fill the information gap as their doctor finally speaks to them. Similarly, keeping these details updated on hospital signage in a patient’s room can improve the hospital staff’s internal communication, who frequently need easy access.
Other ways to entertain or engage patients or interactive sessions can take place on digital signage to better experience the admitted patients.
8. Digital Menu Boards
Conclusively, internal hospital communication can be better by using digital signage as Digital Menu Boards for the cafeteria. Besides being actively used for fast restaurants or coffee shops, digital menu boards inside hospitals can convey deals and quick lunches. Mounted in hospital cafeterias and lounges can increase hospital efficiency for staff, doctors, nurses, and administration who don’t have time to take lunch breaks and instead go for a quick meal.
According to a GetApp survey, communication is around 43.4% important in the healthcare industry. This relates to the fact that hospitals are giant mazes with an immense workload that has to be in an efficient organization. Ineffective dissemination can cripple hospital management. Hence, hospital signage can strengthen internal communication and eliminate chances of error. Using various healthcare digital signage features, hospitals can utilize it to elevate transmission of messages, interactivity, and resourcefulness to another level.
You can learn more about NexSigns’ Digital Signage solution and connect with us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube to get the latest info on digital signage!
