Health Partners
Dynamic Content Enhances Visitor Experience
A Visual Communications Network for Healthcare
HealthPartners is a non-profit, integrated healthcare system with 25 clinics located in metropolitan and suburban Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. The health care provider recently installed a visual communications network powered by the X2O platform at several of its locations, greatly improving the patient and staff experience.
Health Partners wanted to bring that same level of information and engagement it had on its digital signage screens to the kiosk already installed on the 8th floor, 8W Medical Surgical Unit, of its Methodist Hospital location, which was undergoing renovations.
Renowned for its high-quality patient care, medical expertise, and disease management, the hospital wanted the kiosk to echo that leadership and service with an improved interactive layout and dynamic content features for a more personalized experience that encouraged visitors to use the kiosk and offered them a new level of information services while at the hospital.
The User Experience
Positioned to welcome patients and visitors, the Methodist Hospital’s 8th floor kiosk needed a robust home page portal with highly visual navigation that would not only invite further content exploration, but also allow users to quickly and easily jump to the content they needed. In an effort to improve communications, each channel or category within the home menu of the kiosk features a variety of media-rich content, including:
- A searchable database of staff members, which allows visitors to find out more information on each member of their care team
- Parking and hospital wayfinding maps
- Construction updates
- Dining options, including the current specials and hours
- Pharmacy, gift, and health shop channels with hours and other store information including special events taking place and current promotions
- Spiritual care where visitors can find out chaplain hours along with an inspiring thought of the week
- Care channel, which provides a variety of relaxing videos for visitors to choose from as well as more information on the hospital’s healing services offerings
- Unit info for the specific floor
System Design
Previously integrated by Parallel Technologies, the 8th floor kiosk hardware consists of a 46-inch interactive touchscreen display and dual-core Cisco® Interactive Experience Client IEC media player. The HTML5-based X2O platform manages each of the content channels and publishes it to the Cisco IEC media player, which beckons visitors with an eye-catching visual portal where they can easily see and select a variety of fresh, inviting content.
Using the X2O platform’s intuitive user interface, hospital staff can drag-and-drop objects to create and manage numerous channels with ease and distribute them across the facility’s network of displays, as well as to the interactive kiosk, dramatically streamlining the hospital’s content management workflow.
The X2O platform also gives the hospital the ability to easily incorporate data-driven graphics connected to corporate databases such as SAP®, Excel® spreadsheets, or RSS feeds by linking to internal and external data sources. In the case of the 8th floor kiosk, within the “unit info” channel, users can access dynamic informational graphs rating the quality of care received on the floor as scored by patients, providing kiosk users with a unique user experience as well as critical information about their care.
Whether the staff is creating unique content channels for specific hospital units, such as the 8th floor kiosk, or more content channels that can be scaled and distributed to digital displays around the hospital, the X2O platform simplifies the process, ensures consistency, and saves time and staff resources.
Patient And Staff Reaction
“The kiosk is instrumental in getting all our patients and visitors at the hospital the information they need to make their stay easier and less stressful,” said Angela Holte, Clinical Nursing Director at HealthPartners Methodist Hospital. “With the new look and feel, users now have simple access to this valuable content that helps patients feel more comfortable with choosing our facility for their care.”
