An educated patient is often more likely to be a healthy patient. But healthcare facilities don’t always have the time to educate each of their patients about every aspect of their health.
That’s why many clinics use their waiting room TVs to educate their patients while also advertising to them. With digital signage, this becomes incredibly easy to do.
Keep reading to learn what digital signage is, exactly, and how your healthcare facility can use it to achieve its marketing goals on pre-existing waiting room TVs while also educating you patient population.
Learn How FYZICAL Chicago Increased Patient Engagement and Education with UPshow
What is digital signage?
Digital signage, as opposed to traditional or static signage, is a type of electronic signage that uses technology to display digital images.
Digital signage commonly features three main components: a smart screen (such as a television), a media player and digital signage management software.
Companies use digital signage because of the numerous benefits it can offer — especially in waiting rooms. For example, a healthcare facility could use its TVs to:
- Stream live TV shows, movies, sports, news and other sources of entertainment
- Improve patient engagement
- Decrease boredom and frustration in the waiting room
- Advertise new services
- Educate its patient population
How to use waiting room TVs to educate
Educating patients is one of the biggest use cases for waiting room TVs that use digital signage. Here are five ways you can educate patients using your existing waiting room TVs:
Communicate key health-related messages
Sharing health-related messages with your patient population can help keep them aware of the actions they should be taking to look after their health.
This can be challenging as many people won’t pay close attention to static sources of information, like posters and infographics.
Communicating your key health-related messages on television screens can be much more effective. Patients in your waiting area will likely be looking at the screens already if you’re using them to stream entertaining content.
With digital signage, you can completely customize the advertisements that play in between shows and videos. Dedicating some of that advertising time to sharing important health-related messages can be a great way to ensure that your patients pay attention to them.
Raise awareness of symptoms of common illnesses
The list of commonly-missed symptoms for dangerous diseases is longer than you’d think. That’s why it’s so important for healthcare clinics to do their part in keeping people informed about the symptoms of common illnesses.
Digital signage makes this a breeze — you can easily turn your screens into engaging content that highlights commonly missed or ignored symptoms.
Encourage vaccination and community health measures
Your waiting room televisions can also be an excellent tool for sharing important vaccination and community health information with patients.
These issues are under the spotlight in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with disinformation being one of the primary reasons why some people choose not to get vaccinated.
For example, according to Vox the main reasons Americans aren’t getting vaccinated are that they:
- Don’t think they have access to the vaccine
- Aren’t worried about COVID-19
- Believe the vaccine’s side effects are more severe than they are
- Don’t trust vaccines
- Don’t trust the institutions surrounding vaccines
A healthcare clinic can play a key role in addressing misinformation simply by displaying facts and figures about important vaccines through its waiting room TVs.
For example, you might use your TV to highlight real people from the community who have received the vaccine, or share statistics about the extremely low number of people who experience negative side effects.
Walkthrough common medical procedures
A total of 63% of Americans say they have waiting room anxiety.
One of the biggest reasons why people experience anxiety is a fear of the unknown. Hospitals can do a lot to reduce their patients’ pre-visit anxiety by simply outlining common medical procedures on their waiting room TVs.
By doing this, you can show your patients exactly what they will experience when with their physician. Providing this foresight can help the patient to relax and calm those waiting room jitters.
This can also be great information for a patient’s family members to have — especially those that might be nervous about a procedure or treatment that a loved one might be facing.
Introduce key members of the medical team
Using your waiting room screens to share information about your team can help your clinic feel more like a community that’s full of real, vibrant people instead of a cold, hard institution.
Once again, digital signage makes this incredibly easy to do — you can quickly and easily set up informational slides and videos to display at whatever schedule and frequency you like best.
The impact of this can be quite significant. Patients often feel more comfortable when they know who their physician is before meeting them, making this another great tip for reducing waiting room anxiety.
How to use waiting room TVs to advertise
Optimizing your advertisements through digital signage can drastically improve the overall quality and reach of your advertising. Not only does it give you complete control over your screens and the ads they run, but it means that you won’t ever have to worry about providing free marketing to competition or running ads for medications and procedures that you don’t want to endorse.
Here are three ways that digital signage can help you use your waiting room TVs to advertise more effectively:
Advertise specific medications, treatments or products
Control is the biggest benefit that you get from using digital signage software to power your waiting room TVs. You will be able to create customized advertisements and run them on a repeating schedule that satisfies all of your marketing needs.
This is especially helpful if you have a new product, service or partnership that you want your patients to know about.
When you use digital signage software like UPshow, managing your advertisements is a breeze. You can use our platform on any internet-connected device and instantly broadcast those changes across all of your screens with the touch of a button. How’s that for efficiency?
Raise awareness of community events
Your waiting room TVs are also an excellent place to raise awareness of important community events. For example, maybe your clinic has partnered with a local charity to conduct a walkathon or a fun run to support a health-related cause.
If so, you likely want to take advantage of the attention that your waiting room TVs get throughout the day to advertise the event — and there’s no easier way to do that than with digital signage.
Frame content in company branding or colors
One of the best ways to advertise your clinic is to build a brand with a reputation that carries in your community.
Digital signage can help you do that by allowing you to frame the content you display on your waiting room TVs in ways that support the brand identity you wish to create for your facility.
You can do this in a few different ways.
For example, you might run advertisements that highlight the familial feeling of your clinic to support a brand image of being close with the community. Or, you can keep it simple by displaying your logo and brand colors on the ads that you run to help keep your brand at the front of your patients’ minds.
These are just a few examples of the type of branding you can do with digital signage, but really, you are only limited by your imagination. Digital signage software lets you quickly create and share whatever brand-benefitting content you can think of with ease.
Setting up your waiting room TVs with digital signage
If you’re as convinced as we are that digital signage is the best way to power your waiting room TVs, then you’ll likely want to begin thinking about how you’re going to implement this solution.
The process is fairly straightforward. Here’s what you will need:
- Screens that connect to the internet (these could be your existing waiting room TVs)
- Media players (or smart TVs with media players already integrated)
- Digital signage software
The next step is simply setting up your screens in a way that will maximize the number of people that see them. This usually means hanging them in strategic locations to ensure they’re visible from all angles.
Optimize your waiting room TV content with UPshow
Digital signage makes waiting room TV more engaging and informative while also helping healthcare clinics to make faster progress towards their in-facility marketing goals. If those are things that you’d like to take advantage of, then checking out UPshow might be worth your while.
Our digital signage software makes it incredibly easy to optimize your waiting room TVs. With it, you can:
- Share more than 500 channels of streaming entertainment
- Create customized advertisements
- Set the exact rotation of how you display your content
- Advertise your products and services
- Measure the performance of various types of content over time
But don’t just take our word for it. Let us show you exactly what UPshow can do for your clinic today.
You can get started by filling out this form and signing up for a free custom demo of our software.
