Overview:
Gold Coast University Hospital (GCUH) is the 3rd largest hospital in Queensland, Australia.
GCUH has 8 main buildings and a total of 59 floors with 1.83 Million sq ft floor space. The wayfinding kiosks help heavy traffic navigate among over 8,000 rooms and 250 departments on campus. It is extremely hard for the average digital signage solution vendor to manage such a large-scale campus. The solution needs to dynamically manage buildings, floors, departments and rooms in both directory and maps. On top of that, the map system has to guide the public to various facilities and amenities, nearby transportations, POIs in the community, etc.
22MILES wayfinding system is able to manage this extensive data from central office, while offering end users a fast-responsive turn-by-turn navigations to any room on campus. Multi-lingual directory serves diverse groups in their native languages during their kiosk usage. Internal staff also enjoys the convenience of the system: After logging with username and password, employees are able to find a way to non-public destinations, based on their privileges. Cross-campus turn-by-turn navigation with print or QR scan directions is also heavily utilized.
Objectives:
GCUH knew the problem while designing their massive hospital campus: wayfinding would be a huge issue for the large and diverse population to navigate through. Everyday, specific rooms or even entire departments could be frequently moved around, expanded, or shrunk, internal staff would need to find non-public rooms, in-patient areas would be closed after visiting hours, and some departments would not open on weekends. GCUH needed a dynamic and efficient solution to guide individuals from a large traffic to quickly and easily retrieve real-time directional information without getting lost. But large hospitals, like GCUH, couldn’t afford to come back to a software vendor again and again and keep waiting for assistance with such frequent mapping changes throughout their campus. Another issue they would need to overcome was the multicultural presence at Queensland with the language barriers. Adding up all these requirements, a seamless backend management seemed to be an impossible task.
However, 22MILES’ standard, off-the-shelf wayfinding software solves all of these issues natively with no customization or programming needed, and administrators can update content and wayfinding themselves with minimal training.
Product Description & Timeframe:
One of GCUH’s contractors, Command Australia (CA), approached 22MILES after a tradeshow, with the hope that hey could help GCUH find the best solution to integrate. To their surprise, the powerful digital signage and wayfinding platform from 22MILES was able to cover 100% of their needs. The biggest obstacle in GCUH's adamant requirements was an interactive wayfinding solution with a TRUE user editing/control capability, which was already part of native features in 22MILES digital wayfinding product.
This software offered GCUH a one-stop management experience through its comprehensive built-in features with minimal customizations: map editor handled floor plan updates for both kiosk and mobile, private/public pathway re-routing, and route scheduling; content editor dealt with all content/interface updates in 5 major languages, and automatically connected any live events to the floor map; designer controlled layout update beyond template limitations; KMS monitored player status with flexible scheduling rules; staff management helped 19 private floors to be accessed with a login privilege.
Results:
22MILES Wayfinding and signage software saved communication time, and produced a successful result without any surprises from the beginning. Even after a 3-month project delay, 22MILES wayfinding system was still able to launch the kiosk testing, 2 months ahead of grand opening. After a half-day training, CA could easily master the user-friendly backend system, and proficiently publish several rounds of mapping changes, language translations, and template designs during 2-week installation. The on-site integrator reported that since opening, “a large number of people were using the wayfinding kiosk – everyone including the elderly”. Self-service wayfinding kiosks helped to reduce stress and confusion of patients and visitors, while they navigate at their own pace. GCUH was successfully under the budget and able to add a new mobile wayfinding feature for smartphone users. These modern wayfinding kiosk facilities in GCUH proved customer satisfaction and retention. Success achieved!
