Corde Kurtz
Operating a multiple-location healthcare practice is much different than operating a single-location practice. Each clinic or facility is going to have its unique elements—from varying patient demographics and competitors to varying specialties and providers. As a result, you will always be tasked with ensuring consistency across locations, and this is where branding, patient experience strategy, and room aesthetics become critical to your success.
Whether you have three locations or 20, the more cohesive and standardized you can make your operational spaces, the more brand loyalty, positive reviews, and referrals you’ll likely see. This article will walk you through some strategies to help develop consistency across your organization as well as modernize your spaces.
1. Keep Your Branding Consistent
Brand consistency is defined as how your organization delivers messages that align with your mission, core values, customer experience, and brand proposition. When you’re consistent with branding, your organization is easily identifiable across all touchpoints whether someone is in one of your waiting rooms, on your website, or driving past one of your locations.
But what else does brand consistency do for your organization? Besides playing a key role in setting your practice apart from competitors, brand consistency enhances your legitimacy, helps give patients a good first impression, and builds trust. For these reasons, it’s important your locations encompass the same brand identity.
Here are ways to develop brand consistency across your locations:
- Always use the same colors, fonts, and graphics with your brand’s visual identity and logo.
- Use a single website for your practice with a dedicated page for each location describing services, providers, hours, and contact information.
- Be active on social media by regularly posting engaging content, sharing patient reviews and testimonials, and responding to comments and messages. Have one account for each social media platform, not one for each location.
- Utilize digital signage in waiting areas and patient rooms to show your brand identity while also displaying content that informs, educates, and entertains patients and visitors.
Brand and content consistency increase revenue by 23% according to research by Lucidpress.
2. Upgrade Patient and Visitor Waiting Areas
When it comes to brand consistency, Apple continues to be one of the most legendary companies in the retail market for phones and technology. Their many years of success has much to do with how they designed their stores to focus on customer engagement and provide a consistent brand experience.
That said, if you need to develop consistency across your organization’s locations, it’s time to start thinking about how to upgrade your waiting areas to unify your practice and modernize your points of service.
Consider upgrading by doing the following:
- Design your waiting areas so patients and visitors can choose between active and private spaces.
- Bring movable furniture, seats, and tables into your waiting areas to accommodate a variety of different activities like working from a laptop, reading, playing games, and eating or drinking.
- Instead of stacking waiting room tables with outdated magazines and newsletters, give patients and visitors ways to make more use of their wait times with their laptops and mobile devices.
- Add digital signage to provide patients and visitors with educational content, announcements, news, and entertainment.
3. Streamline Your Check-In Process
The very first point of contact for people who visit a healthcare provider is the check-in area. Until recent years, it was often associated with long lines, paperwork, and a fair amount of frustration. But thanks to automation technology, the entire process of checking in for health care is becoming more seamless and satisfying.
The following are a few additional ways to facilitate the check-in process:
- Onboard a mobile healthcare app so patients can make appointments, receive alerts about their care, check-in for appointments ahead of arrival, and communicate with providers.
- Provide semi-private spaces for patients to complete questionnaires and paperwork. Chairs placed in small clusters are helpful, as are tabletops and desk stations adequately spaced apart.
- Use digital signage for queue management, procedure updates, and important health-related reminders.
In one study, the wait time in emergency departments with kiosk self-check-in services was 56.8% shorter compared to emergency departments without kiosk services.
Putting It All Together
The above strategies are proven approaches for building consistency across multi-location medical practices. Understandably, however, each strategy on its own can be a large undertaking–especially if you have many locations or you’re planning a large expansion. And that’s why you need a design-build partner.
With over two decades of design-build experience, our professionals at DBSI are here to help you discover what types of medical space upgrades can help foster more consistency across your locations. To request a complimentary consultation, please fill out our online form or call us at 855.ASK.DBSI.
