BY REBECKA FERMANN

MazeMap helps St. Olav’s hospital reduce their level of missed appointments by 31 % in a two year period, saving the hospital 1.5M USD annually.

One of the rationales for St. Olav’s hospital procuring MazeMap back in 2014 was that they envisioned the digital wayfinding system could help reduce the number of missed appointments. They had patients showing up a day in advance just to get familiar with the hospital grounds before their next day appointment, and wayfinding represented a significant challenge for patients.

In fact, 2.9 % of all appointments at St. Olav’s were no-shows in 2014, representing a cost of over 5M USD for the hospital in stand-by resources and equipment being unused. Of course, the reasons why patients miss their appointments are many-faceted, and cannot be attributed to poor wayfinding alone. But it is undisputed that easily available wayfinding represents part of the problem.

St. Olav’s hospital did several measures to reduce the number of missed appointments, and one of the key elements was engaging with MazeMap to find digital solutions to make the hospital more available to the public. Part of the solution became to include URLs to digital maps in their patient reminders on SMS. MazeMap can automatically generate URLs with directions to your specific point of registration at the hospital, also outlining where you can park and how to find your way both indoors and outdoors.

This solution was part of the puzzle when St. Olav’s managed to reduce their missed appointments by 31 % to 2.0 % in 2016 – saving over 1.5M USD every year.

St. Olav’s have had great success with MazeMap for many years, and are helping tens of thousands users each month. They have achieved this without having any designated resources actively managing their MazeMap installation, as it is integrated with their space management software Lydia to keep all maps automatically up to speed.

Without introducing new internal procedures at the hospital, St. Olav’s has succeeded in making a digital wayfinding tool easily available for the public to enjoy, playing an essential role in reducing the number of missed appointments.

Let us know if you want to speak to us in MazeMap about how to design digital wayfinding systems that actually bring real value in a hospital context.

Department Operations Manager at St. Olavs, Bjørn Henning Hammer is showing us the 35% reduction of missed appointments and 1.5 million euro saved each year by using MazeMap.