Indoor Wayfinding within the UVA Health System

Project Lead - Maitri Patel, MPH—Advocacy and Clinical Application Coordinator

The Challenge

Patients - and sometimes Doctors and Nurses - consistently express difficulties and feelings of being overwhelmed while navigating the UVA Health system. Patient dissatisfaction is heavily determinant on access to care. Patient tardiness to appointments and use of medical staff for navigational advice create areas of waste within the hospital system that could be better mitigated with an indoor mapping service.

Our Solution

Our team has been assembled to integrate mapping data and tools from commercial and open-data repositories to build a best-in-class wayfinding product for the patients, medical staff, and community members who navigate within the walls of the UVA Health system. Our main goals are to minimize patient barriers to access of care by allowing detailed parking information and step-by-step instructions to walk through the hospital based on patient input of physician/department/appointment location. We hope that after beta-testing and success of navigation,  we will expand the application to allow for multi-stop function, various language functions, and spoken instructions to maximize accessibility. After the 2D rendering is complete, we hope to utilize LiDAR technology to supplement the maps and consider augmented reality applications.

Where

Using foundational work established by Derrick Stone and the Mazemap team, we will begin our mapping in the main hospital and expand to cover the battle building, Couric Cancer Center, and West Complex.

How:

Using the Mazemap online system, we will map out the location pins of each department of the UVA main hospital and surrounding hospitals. Using the pre-programmed routing algorithms, we will confirm efficient and accessible patient pathways.  We are also working to integrate with bus schedules from public transportation and UVa transit, as well as information such as pedestrian and wheelchair access resources. 

When:

Week of 9/20: Testing LIDAR tooling in the UVA Health Science Library 

Sept 23 8-9PM Zoom link - team meeting

October 6th: Contacted Derrick Stone and got in touch with the Mazemap team

October 19th: Completed the Mazemap orientation and added all new team members to the mazemap user editor team

Week of October 25th: Divided remaining location pins to be programmed into Mazemap

November: Complete 2D location pinning for UVA main hospital and surrounding buildings

December: Internally test the routing paths for accuracy, efficiency, and accessibility paths

January: Begin beta-testing using medical staff and students

January: Contact select departments for input on most common paths utilized by patients from their department

February: Create screenshots and QR codes for most commonly utilized paths and continue developing the mazemap application based on consumer feedback.

Some initial tests in MazeMap

Creating predefined maps - such as this one from the Guyenet Lab in Pinn Hall over to the Cafeteria

In the toolbar the user gets detailed visual and textual directions to aid in wayfinding

Support Team:

Technical Advisor - Joe Jamison, Visitable.org

Students and staff

Hollis Cutler: GIS routing & Python coding

Nora Dale: OpenStreetMap transportation lead

Michelle Miles: Accessibility expert and design lead

Lena Nguyen: OpenStreetMap project & community lead

Anson Parker: Health Science Library IT 

Erich Purpur: Research Librarian

Derrick Stone: Computer Science and Software Programming Lead

And a special thanks to MazeMap

Steven Newman: VP of Sales, Mazemap

Tatiana Kosmida: Mazemap Troubleshooting Lead

Daniel Schjetne: Mazemap Troubleshooting Lead

Additional Notes:

We may need to integrate this work with existing infrastructure such as OpenStreetMap and other Charlottesville City maps, and we look forward to investigating this in the future.