Before a hospital visit, patients often have a few basic questions: Which entrance should I use? Where do I park? How far is the imaging center from the main lobby? Will I make it to my appointment on time?
On a large campus, answering them can mean moving from the parking garage to the elevator bank to the correct clinic. Patients and visitors may already be managing an unfamiliar diagnosis, paperwork, or a tight appointment schedule. Finding the right place shouldn’t add another hurdle.
Healthcare navigation gives patients a clearer way through the visit. With mobile directions, campus information, and location-aware guidance, people can spend less time trying to orient themselves and more time preparing for care.
The Part of the Patient Journey That Happens Before Check-In
Clinical Excellence Doesn’t Make a Campus Easy to Navigate
A health system can offer excellent care and still be difficult to get around.
Campuses grow over decades. Buildings get connected, departments move, entrances change, and services expand into separate towers or outpatient locations. Signs and printed maps remain useful, but they can’t tell a patient where they are or guide them from the parking lot to a specific department.
Hospital indoor wayfinding gives patients and visitors a route that reflects the campus as it is today.
When (Not) Finding the Way Adds Stress
A patient who arrives late or flustered may need directions before they can focus on the appointment itself. A caregiver may be trying to find a waiting room while keeping track of a loved one’s instructions. A first-time visitor may not know that the closest entrance isn’t the one they need. Traveling nurses, visiting healthcare professionals, and catering staff need to find their way, too—especially when it’s their first day on campus.
Digital healthcare navigation gives people useful direction before a simple logistics question becomes another source of stress.
The Operational Impact of a Hard-to-Navigate Campus
Help Patients Find the Right Entrance
Going in through the wrong entrance can mean a longer walk to registration or the clinic. Directions sent before a visit can help patients choose the right entrance, and on-campus guidance can help them find their way from there.
Give People Another Way to Check Directions
Front-desk teams, security staff, volunteers, and clinicians help people find clinics, labs, and waiting rooms. Hospital navigation gives people directions they can check on their phones as they go.
At Mount Sinai Hospital, 363 app users viewed the map from January through May 2026, and 272 started a route, or about three in four map users.
Bridging the Gap With Patient Experience Technology
Precision Indoor Positioning and Blue-Dot Wayfinding
Indoor positioning can show patients a live blue dot on a mobile map, then guide them with turn-by-turn directions to a clinic, lab, pharmacy, waiting area, or other approved destination.
The experience is familiar to anyone who uses navigation in the car, but it is designed for garages, hallways, elevators, connected buildings, and outdoor paths.
On supported devices, Phunware’s blue dot shows people where they are on the map as they walk. The published accuracy standard is within three meters 90% of the time. When someone changes floors during an active route, the map and blue dot update within 10 seconds 90% of the time.
Phunware supports positioning hardware from multiple providers, so health systems can choose from compatible options for their campuses.
Location-Aware Information When It’s Useful
Patients often have small but important questions along the way: Where do I park? Which entrance should I use? What happens when I get there?
A mobile experience can bring those answers together. Patients can get parking guidance before they arrive, directions once they’re on campus, or a notification as they approach a specific location. Geofences and beacons make those notifications possible. Appointment details and mobile check-in can also connect through MyChart.
That gives patients practical help at the moments it matters most.
Routes That Work for More Patients
Not everyone can take the same route through a hospital campus. Some people need a path without stairs, an accessible entrance, an elevator, or directions in their preferred language.
Phunware can help patients and visitors find step-free routes for wheelchairs and strollers. Health systems can also offer directions in more than one language.
Making navigation accessible means more people can get where they need to go without extra work.
Make Navigation Part of the Patient Experience
Finding the right place starts before a patient leaves home. They may need to choose a facility, plan when to arrive, and find their way to the right department once they’re there.
Singing River Health System’s MySingingRiver app helps with those early steps. Patients can find providers and facilities, schedule appointments, and plan visits to participating walk-in clinics. Phunware developed a web-based healthcare landing page within the app. Read the case study here.
Build a More Connected Healthcare Campus
A digital front door healthcare strategy works best when patients don’t have to juggle separate tools to prepare for a visit, find the right entrance, and get to the right department.
Phunware’s Patient Intelligence Platform brings patient access, campus information, mobile engagement, and wayfinding into one mobile experience. It can support a new patient app or extend an existing digital experience, helping health systems make healthcare navigation easier for patients, visitors, and staff across a complex campus.
Phunware’s healthcare partners work directly with health systems to design, deploy, and maintain location-based services.
Phunware also works with technology partners whose location hardware and software it brings together in apps built with Phunware’s software.
Explore Phunware’s healthcare solutions and schedule a strategy session to see how a connected hospital navigation system could support your patient experience strategy.
