Wayfinding App Helps Visitors and Staff at University Health System Find Their Way

February 1, 2015

By Cheryl L. Serra

Cheryl SerraA person could get plenty lost in the maze of a ten-story, one-million-square-foot new building addition. But leaders at University Health System (UHS) in San Antonio, TX acted quickly to make sure that didn’t happen. They teamed with Etelu to develop a wayfinding application (app) that helps patients, visitors, and staff find their way around the new tower and the existing hospital. Development of other apps that will help with things like locating doctors and tracking surgery at UHS are on tap.

The app uses Cisco’s CMX platform to provide the blue dot technology—named because it puts a blue dot on a map to show where the user is in relation to where they want to go—to give users the directions they need to get where they’re going.

People who download the app to their mobile device can view floor maps, get explicit directions for navigating within the buildings and help find key offices and services such as labs, cafeterias and the gift shop.

Like the state of Texas itself, it seems that everything about UHS is bigger than many other healthcare facilities. It is the primary teaching partner of the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. Its operating budget is $1.2 billion. It has nearly 6,000 team members (staff), a medical staff of 1,300 and 500 residents. Thousands of patients and visitors come to its campus each year.


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