Healthcare clinics can be tough to manage. You need to ensure that your patients have a good experience, keep your staff trained and happy and make sure that you’re also meeting all of your business goals. Achieving all three of these things simultaneously is no small feat.
However, you don’t have to work towards your goals alone. Instead, you should consider using a digital signage solution. Digital signage makes it easier to manage every aspect of your clinic.
Don’t believe us? Keep reading. You’ll learn how digital signage:
- Makes your clinic a more enjoyable place to be for your patients
- Helps your employees make the most of their workday
- Keeps your healthcare clinic running at its full potential
What is digital signage, exactly?
Let’s start with a quick review of what digital signage is so that we’re all starting on the same foot. Digital signage is a screen that uses special software to display video or multimedia content to an audience.
Companies use digital signage to connect with their guests, patients or customers. They do so because digital signage provides an easy way to display engaging content, share important information and advertise products or services.
Digital signage has a wide variety of use cases, which makes it a good fit for businesses across many industries. For example, healthcare clinics can benefit tremendously from using digital signage solutions to work towards business goals like improved patient satisfaction or more efficient administrative processes.
What screens do I need for digital signage?
You might be asking yourself this question if you’re not familiar with digital signage. But there’s no need to invest in cutting-edge technology if you want to use digital signage.
You can just use a standard TV, iPad or whatever other screens you already have on hand. You’ll just need to connect your screens with digital signage software, which UPshow can do for you.
How digital signage helps patients
1. Speed up the patient intake process
Admitting a patient into your clinic can be quite a process. Your patients may grow frustrated when they have to wait in line to do this. But digital signage can eliminate the problem for your patients.
You can use digital signage to set up interactive kiosks where your patients can check themselves in. Instead of having to wait to speak with one of your employees, the patient will be able to do almost everything necessary on their own.
This can streamline your check-in process and start your patients’ visits off on the right foot.
2. Entertain patients to reduce their perceived wait time
Healthcare clinic waiting rooms are nothing to sneeze at. The average patient wait time in the United States is close to 20 minutes and urgent care wait times can be even longer. But there’s a big difference in the amount of time that seems to pass when you’re enjoying yourself and when you’re entirely bored.
Digital signage keeps your patients entertained so that your wait times start to feel shorter to them. You can use your screens to display entertaining content that engages your patients and keeps them satisfied even when your wait times aren’t ideal.For example, urgent clinics can put up a list of patient numbers or numbers ordered based on who they’ll see next to give patients a better sense of how long they’ll need to wait.
3. Reduce your patients’ anxiety
Visiting a healthcare clinic can be a very anxiety-inducing experience for some patients. But you can use digital signage to distract your patients from this feeling while they’re in your waiting room.
Once again, the answer lies in using your digital signage to display engaging content. Doing so will give your anxiety-prone patients something else to focus on besides their anxiety. And that’ll be half of the battle for them to start feeling better.
4. Share important health and safety information more effectively
Digital signage also gives you a more effective means of broadcasting the health and safety information that you want your patients to have. With screens in your waiting rooms and hallways, patients will have ample opportunities to discover your messaging without any prompting on your end.
This makes digital signage perfect for sharing:
- Wellness tips
- Ongoing health and safety issues in the community
- Treatment procedures
- General medical advice
- And more
How digital signage helps employees
1. Free up your employees’ time
Your staff has a limited amount of time to complete their work. But you can help them increase their productivity if you automate some of the simpler tasks that they do every day. Digital signage is perfect for this.
You can use interactive kiosks with digital signage software to automate patient check-in procedures and information sharing. If your staff doesn’t have to do these tasks themselves, then they’ll have more time to focus on the most complicated parts of their jobs.
2. Simplify the training process
Healthcare standards change over time as new research comes out and provides a better framework If you run a healthcare clinic, you need to adapt to new information as it comes out to keep up with the times. That means you’ll always have to train and retrain your staff to get them on board with the new way of doing things.
Digital signage can help you with this process. You can easily create a portal with digital signage software that allows you to efficiently share training videos with your staff. You can record a video once, post it to the portal and you won’t have to repeat the information yourself over and over again.
3. Share internal information more efficiently
Digital signage is also great for sharing various types of internal communications that you may have for your staff or that they may want to share amongst themselves. Training videos are one example of this. But you can also organize staff schedules, patient statuses and other important information within your digital signage solution.
4. Decrease hallway congestion
If your clinic is a big one, then your patients may sometimes lose their sense of direction while looking for the correct location. You can resolve this problem by using digital signage software to create interactive wayfinding tools for your screens.
Your patients can use the wayfinding tools to figure out where they’re supposed to go and to find the best route for getting there. This can decrease the number of confused patients that you have wandering your hallway. It will also save your staff from having to join the lost patients in the hallways to direct them where they need to go.
How digital signage helps health clinics
1. Promote your best services and products
Digital signage is a highly effective way to advertise your offerings internally. You can even do so in-between the content that you share on your screens to keep your patients entertained.
With this feature, you can replace some of your existing internal advertising methods with digital signage. That could save you money and boost the effectiveness of your campaigns since your patients will be keeping an eye on your screens to check out your content anyways.
2. Spread awareness of ongoing health concerns
Healthcare clinics have a duty to keep their patients and their communities informed on ongoing health concerns such as the flu or an infectious disease. Digital signage makes it easier to carry out this responsibility without having to invest in additional promotional materials or burdening your staff with another task to complete.
3. Reinforce your brand image and share it
Patients nowadays have a lot of different options to consider when deciding where to pursue healthcare. Clinics need to make themselves stand out to remain successful.
Digital signage can help you do this. It gives you 24/7 means of shaping your brand image and sharing it with the audience that it matters most to. Digital signage software offers powerful tools that will help you do this with minimal effort on your end.
It’s a great way to help your clinic stand out with its unique offerings. You could highlight being pet-friendly, highlight your positive reviews or biographical information about your staff.
4. Remove pharmaceutical advertisements from your screens
Displaying live TV channels on the screens in your waiting room presents several potential problems. One is that you might inadvertently run advertisements for pharmaceutical ads that could give your patients the wrong perception.
Digital signage solves this problem. While using it, you’ll get to pick exactly which channels your guests have access to.
You’ll also get to decide which advertisements play in-between breaks in content. You won’t ever have to worry about giving your patients the wrong impression about your relationship with pharmaceutical companies again.
UPshow is the right digital signage provider for your healthcare clinic
From your patients to your employees, to the clinic itself, every part of your retail healthcare clinic can benefit from investing in digital signage. But not all digital signage solutions are the same. To get the most out of your screens, you’ll want to choose UPshow to be your software provider.
UPshow’s digital signage solutions will help you reach patients, customers and healthcare employees with content and offers that increase their engagement and drive better outcomes.
We can help you keep your patient informed, boost your sales numbers and enhance the quality of your waiting room TV, among many other value-adding services.
But don’t take our word for it. Give our solution a chance for yourself to see what makes UPshow different. You can do that by signing up for a custom demo today.
