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Written by Geoff Halstead

Category: Patient Experience

Published: 04 May 2016

• Patient Experience
• GoogleMaps
• MediNav

This article from DHealthcare News is a great illustration of how the new on-demand logistics capabilities of a service like Uber and have a direct and meaningful impact on reducing no-shows and late appointments for hospitals, while simultaneously improving the Patient Experience.

Hospitals are finding new apps to tackle an old problem: Patient no-shows

Of particular interest to us, of course, is that our partner HackensackUMC is as usual leading the way in innovation in this area.   Here's an excerpt.

• HackensackUMC recently partnered with Uber to try and cut down on its no-shows and late arrivals as well as to give patients a better overall experience. Located in the heavily congested Bergen County, just outside New York City, the hospital’s specialty care facilities, emergency rooms, and medical office building are sprawled across a 3 million-square-foot campus. On any given day, about 10,000 patients and employees go through its doors.
• Lozano says when patients are asked why they canceled at the last minute or rescheduled an appointment, the answer often relates back to transportation, especially when patients are coming in for an outpatient procedure and know they will be able to drive themselves home.
• What the hospital needed was a convenient option for getting patients to their appointments on time by delivering them to the appropriate building, says Lozano.
• “What happened before was people always would come to the front door," Lozano says. "Now, with Uber, we’ve allowed them to come on our campus and specifically map out every specific entrance point … into the hospital.”
• On Tuesday, Uber Stop signs went up in front of each drop-off site. When people go on Uber and say they want to go to Hackensack, a scrolling dial pops up that asks where they need to go on the campus, Lozano explains. “When you click on that entrance point, the driver’s GPS will take you to that site.”

As we go forward with Hackensack UMC with our deployment of MediNav connecting the dots with Uber will be a great area of opportunity to further improve efficiency for the hospital, drivers and arriving patients and visitors all at once.  These are the kinds of integrations that we look forward to create value and ROI.  

Filling the Gap with Google Maps

Our ability to add extra layers of data on the campus with our Google Maps for Work partnership - waypoints, markers, routes, points of interest, labels and more - and our knowledge of and ability to navigate users to the indoor locations that are their ultimate destinations are the final crucial pieces to this puzzle.

Google normally has incomplete information and at times is completely wrong.  This is not because they are not good at mapping!   They know the street networks and public places of our world better than anyone.  But campuses are private facilities, often with restricted access.  Google also knows nothing about the organization and buildings - what are the correct entrances to buildings, the correct parking garages in relation to each building, and other particulars that are critical to successful wayfinding.

That is where Connexient's Parking Planner feature comes into play - recommending and navigating the user to the correct parking garage based on the indoor location of their appointment.  We can use this same capability to make this Uber drop-off service even more accurate and efficient.  And as with our My Car Saver feature, we can also help the user get back from inside the building to the Uber pick-up location when they are done with their appointment.

So connecting the dots and closing the gaps like this are crucial to solving real world wayfinding challenges.  More to come on that in a few months!

Details

Written by Geoff Halstead

Category: HiMSS

Published: 04 March 2016

• Patient Experience
• Digital Wayfinding
• API+SDK
• HiMSS2016

After a very hectic but rewarding and exciting week at HIMSS16, it is time to catch our breath and take stock. Here are our take-aways from the show on the status of Digital Wayfinding, Navigation and Location-based Services in Healthcare.

The Market Has Arrived

What we saw at HIMSS16 mirrors what we have seen generally over the last couple of quarters: the market has arrived!  Digital Wayfinding and Indoor Navigation are no longer a new concept, to be considered and explored, with perhaps a pilot. Rather, we are seeing fully funded, well defined RFPs, and requests for quotations for multiple sites and Enterprise network deployments.

Yes, in this there will always of course be some mix of pilots. But there are many forward leaning healthcare networks that want to positively impact Patient Experience with best-in-class Digital Wayfinding and Indoor Navigation right now.

Integration is the Next Step: The Airline Check-in Model

Connexient CEO, Mark Green presenting and discussing the "Airline Check-in Model" user experience at HX360.

For many of our clients, there is a keen understanding that the real value and ROI from Digital Wayfinding and Indoor Navigation will come when it gets integrated into other key components of Patient Experience. One of the most important of these is Appointment Scheduling. This is where Connexient has been pioneering an innovative user experience that we call the Airline Check-in Model with the following benefits:

1. enhance patient experience, making it easy to get to where the patient or visitor wants to go;
2. minimize the stress of patients and visitors face in navigating a large, complex facility;
3. reduce missed or late appointments – capturing lost revenue; and
4. optimize resource utilization by improving enterprise visibility of inbound appointments.

Last week, we announced a partnership with HackensackUMC to bring this from concept to reality. And at HIMSS16, we began fleshing out plans with other clients to do the same.

The Understanding of Indoor Mapping & Navigation as an Enterprise Solution

As important as Digital Wayfinding and Indoor Navigation is to solving a major pain point in Patient and Visitor Experience, Connexient has always emphasized that this is really just the first step.  Connexient’s driving vision and product roadmap is to Location-Enable the Enterprise, enabling, via our API + SDK, navigation-quality indoor maps and location services to be integrated into applications across patient experience, operations, security, facility management and more.    There are then multiple streams of ROI to be gained from each additional integration.

We are actively planning and moving down that roadmap with the National Institutes of Health. At HIMSS16, we began to flesh this out with several other clients.

Working with Stanley

There was also great enthusiasm from mutual clients about the opportunities for ROI and value to patients and staff that can be delivered through our partnership with Stanley Healthcare. The next phase of this collaboration will be very exciting!

Look for Announcements to Come!

So, all-in-all HIMSS16 was the capstone on the next phase in the growth of the market and of Connexient.   Look for lots of news and announcements that will come out of HIMSS16 in the months to come!
 

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Details

Written by Geoff Halstead

Category: Connexient

Published: 23 February 2016

• Patient Experience
• MediNav
• API+SDK

We are very proud to announce today that HackensackUMC deploying MediNav™ in partnership to drive innovation, transformation and Enterprise ROI in Healthcare that will encompass two tracks of innovation.

1. an Enterprise deployment of MediNav™ Navigator Edition 2.0 using the Connexient SDK + API to implement an innovative “Airline check-in model” for Patient Experience; and
2. a collaboration to develop pioneering Indoor Navigation and Augmented Reality features on Google’s revolutionary Project Tango platform.

Making the Airline Check-in Model a Reality

A focal point for Connexient and HackensackUMC will be to develop and pioneer an innovative "Airline Check-in Model" for patient experience where digital wayfinding, navigation and location services are integrated with appointment scheduling and patient flow solutions. When fully deployed, this model will bring multiple benefits to HackensackUMC and its patients:

1. enhance patient experience, making it easy to get to where the patient or visitor wants to go;
2. minimize the stress of patients and visitors face in navigating a large, complex facility;
3. reduce missed or late appointments – capturing lost revenue; and
4. optimize resource utilization by improving enterprise visibility of inbound appointments.

Our First SDK + API Deployment

HackensackUMC will leverage the Connexient API + SDK to integrate MediNav maps, routing, directions and navigation into the new HackensackUMC mobile app patient engagement mobile application, Web site and patient portal. This is another huge and very exciting milestone for Connexient. While the initial integration focused on the problem of Patient Experience is important, the Connexient SDK + API also enables our clients to integrate MediNav maps, navigation and location services into applications and platforms across the Enterprise, such as operations (staff and clinical workflow), asset tracking, security, facility management and more. Each integration will bring increasing ROI to the Enterprise and benefits to the end users.

Pushing the Envelope with Project Tango

 Connexient and HackensackUMC will also partner in a second track to develop first a prototype and then pilot a mobile application built on Google’s revolutionary Project Tango platform with two vectors:

1. Indoor Navigation. Applying Tango as an actual solution for indoor “positioning” and navigation.
2. Augmented Reality. Leveraging Tango unique ability to “see the world as humans do” for a variety of Augmented Reality use cases for navigating and interacting with physical environments.

Working with a Visionary Healthcare IT Leader

“At Hackensack University Medical Center, we are dedicated to healthcare transformation and continuous improvement of the patient experience. We see Indoor Navigation and Location-based Services as a key to solving the challenges patients, visitors – and even team members – face in getting through a large, complex facility such as ours. Our work together with Google’s Project Tango will further push this envelope of innovation with a truly revolutionary leap forward in how mobile devices can understand and interact with the world around them.”

Now It’s Time to Get to Work!

At Connexient, we know taking innovation from an idea to reality take careful planning, hard work and collaboration. The benefits of both of these concepts will only be gained through careful integration not just technically, but ensuring that data flows in both directions and delivers the right information at the right time in an actionable way for the people that use it - whether that be the patient or the hospital staff or caregiver.

We look forward to starting that work today with Hackensack UMC!

Are You Going to HIMSS2016?

Please come see us!

Or schedule a Webex meeting to learn more about the MediNav and the Airline Check-in Model.

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