It is no secret that waiting areas are considered as the face of your hospital. Your waiting room will be your first chance to tell your patients how deeply you care.

Studies indicate that patients undergo a waiting process of an average 25-30 minutes in a clinic and upto 60 minutes in a hospital. It is essential to make this period educational and comfortable to ensure highest levels of patient satisfaction by utilising OPD Waiting Area TV and Real Estate in the right way.

Sometimes even when you provide excellent consultation a patient may be unhappy because his experience leading up to the visitation was not pleasant. And, this often results in a low overall patient satisfaction. As the saying goes, ‘the first impression is the last impression.

Well, fortunately managing your waiting area more effectively is not a heavy investment but definitely an art to learn. Here are some of our tips to help you improve your waiting areas within your OPDs more efficiently:

Providing Personal Space

Having a bench or a row of chairs on one side of the room may feel efficient in covering the room space. However, it doesn’t provide patients with their personal space. Nobody likes to sit elbow-to-elbow with strangers. Similarly, having benches or chairs placed back to back may cause people’s heads to collide and be equally uncomfortable.

Our recommendations:

a. Place clusters of seats for families.
b. Set up independent couches for solo patients.
c. Set up loveseats to efficiently utilize areas.
d. If you are low on space, single chairs placed in pairs also work.

Cheap and comfortable upholstery

When seated for rather long durations it is essential that cushioning of the seats is comfortable and breathable. Hard or sticky materials like leather or plastic may feel itchy to the skin. Similarly, fabrics that are wooly or frizzy may feel tickly through the clothes or like someone is sitting on a cheap carpet.

Our recommendations

a. For bulky sofas and fixed seats favor fabrics that are breathable.
b. Add removable fabric layers onto the seats that can be regularly washed and perfumed.
c. For practices with small spaces add cushion seats onto small chairs.
d. For practices that require washable chairs consider removable chair covers instead.

Keep your patients engaged

Set up waiting room representatives.

There is nothing that works better than a human connection to build patience. If you place a set of representatives that are dedicated to knowing a patient’s profile and needs while the patients wait and greet them upon arrival, the level of patient satisfaction will rise considerably.

The representative can also approach the doctor:
a. To inform on the patient
b. Prioritize which patients should be sent in based on necessity
c. Take note of the waiting reasons from a more internal perspective and present it more acceptably to the patient.

Keep patients informed of their waiting times.

While the best way to enhance patient satisfaction is to of course reduce waiting times, it is sometimes unavoidable. Most patients take time out of their schedule to visit the hospital. If they are met with unprecedented delays or unclear waiting times they are sure to get annoyed. Another way to keep patients satisfied is by providing them a waiting time in advance.

Most patients said they would prefer if the waiting areas displayed waiting times on a digital board. Others preferred if the time of appointment can be sent over to their phones via SMS alerts. OPD Waiting Area TV can be used in a brilliant way by providing current waiting time, appointment queue.

There is a small leap from being bored to being stressed. It is essential to have the right kind of entertainment in the waiting areas. Ideally, magazines are the go-to choices for hospitals and clinics, small stands take little space However, magazines are not the first thing modern patients want.

5. High-speed patient wifi
Most of your patients carry smartphones or laptops. Best way to let them have personalized entertainment is by providing access to high speed data. It will be faster than their mobile data and give them a homely feeling. They can spend time in the activities they love the most on the internet or just watch YouTube.

6. Have an appealing decor
Often patients may also come without phones or run out of batteries. It is essential to have art and murals to engage their senses or an aquarium. Combined with some soft music and right color appeal it is bound to calm the minds of your patients.

7. OPD Waiting Area TV as patient education device
OPD Waiting Area TV is another interesting way to provide entertainment which is also educational in nature. You can add content related to the general health, lifestyle or even information about the most common treatments at your hospital. Additionally, it’s a handy way to provide information about the doctors to your patients in advance and build trust.

Eremedium is India’s largest Patient Education Company at Point of Care covering more than 3,000 health care centers and with over 10,000 doctors on-board which helps in educating millions of patients with various patient engagement strategies inside Hospitals, Clinics, and Nursing Home.

We provide effective, adaptable, creative, and easy to understand patient education and counseling material across different Digital Media platforms, which not only encourages patient education digitally but also develops a sound sense of digital patient engagement.

Our top patient engagement solutions are:

1. MEDIO

It uses OPD Waiting Area TV to increase patient health satisfaction, ease waiting time, and promote health literacy at the moment of greatest impact.

Some of the patient engagement strategies that MEDIO follows:

• Health Education – Empower patients with healthy lifestyle videos, like nutrition and exercise, condition-specific videos, and much more while they are waiting. Content is personalized to the doctor’s specialty and care setting.
• Authenticated Content – Copyrighted patient education library of over 1,000 videos in multiple languages, curated by doctors and approved by top medical associations.

2. MEDCOMM

A 22” interactive digital signage embedded with 3D, Gesture Driven content personalized to specialty and care setting, enabling doctors to give quality consultation in less time.
Some of the notable features are:

• Patient Education – Doctors can now communicate over 1,000 conditions, procedures, and treatment options with patients in an unprecedented way.
• Content Library – Quality consultation in less time by use of copyrighted content library consisting of 3D Anatomy, Gesture Driven videos. The centralized knowledge base of the latest research, clinical tools, medical information at fingertips.
• Real-time Sharing – Doctors can share the treatment options, post-operative care with Patients and their Caregivers in real-time.