Piedmont Atlanta Hospital’s campus is under major construction to make way for its new $603 million, x-bed tower. In order to help guide patients and visitors to the right location on their sprawling campus, the health system has rolled out a new wayfinding app called PiedmontNow.
Piedmont Healthcare partnered with Atlanta-based Gozio Health, which develops mobile wayfinding platforms specifically for hospitals, to introduce PiedmontNow for all six of its current hospitals.
The wayfinding platform provides step by step instructions for guests for locations from the parking deck to urgent care, doctors’ offices, the emergency department and all other publicly-accessible areas. The app can also be used to view urgent care times and hospital amenities and reserve times on doctors’ calendars.
Joshua Titus, CEO and founder of Gozio Health, said more than 75 percent of adults already use their smartphones for navigation. Now they will be able to use their phones to find their way inside Piedmont’s walls as well.
Gozio started introducing its platform in 2015, and now it has apps in 15 hospitals including Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. One-third of current users have viewed urgent care wait times on the app, and 67 percent have viewed hospital amenities.
“Piedmont is one of the first adult hospitals [for Gozio] where we did all these buildings at once,” Titus said. “They kind of brought an adult view of what’s important to a hospital in a competitive environment like Atlanta.”
Piedmont recently acquired Athens Regional Medical Center (now Piedmont Athens Regional), and it plans to add PiedmontNow capabilities at that location in the near future.
“Wayfinding is a hot topic across the industry, and lots of different health systems are trying to figure out what to do with it,” said Katie Logan, vice president of experience at Piedmont Healthcare. “We landed on Gozio as the best fit for their product and technology as well as a local partner to help us think through our strategy in the long term.”
Mapping the hospital in preparation for the app is no easy task. First Gozio comes on site and installs wireless Bluetooth beacons in the ceilings. These connect to Magellan Robotic Systems mapping robots that rove the halls during non-peak hospital hours as if they are visitors. The data gleaned from this process is used to map the hospital and create the interface guests actually see. Gozio spends about two weeks mapping each hospital.
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