NHS South Birmingham wanted a method for delivering messages to the patients at 65 surgeries across South Birmingham from their Head Office in Kings Norton. ONELAN Digital Signage was chosen to achieve this.
The Trust had the following key objectives for their digital signage:
- To Educate – Answer common health and surgery questions thereby achieving improved staff productivity, fewer patient visits, better patient health and earlier awareness of health problems
- To Entertain – Reduce perceived waiting time to achieve happier patients by showing live TV.
- In an Emergency – Simple accessible method for communication of messages instantly
ONELAN Century NTB 615s have been installed in all 65 of the doctors’ surgeries, and three ONELAN Millennium NTB 5000s have been installed in the Head Office.
Content Strategy
The content on the Century Series 615 Net-Top-Boxes (NTBs) in each of the surgeries comprises a combination of the following:
- Practice updates
- Local RSS News feed
- Practice messages & alerts
- Government health videos
Content can be made relevant to the day’s surgery and easily changeable at the location by the receptionists. Ad Hoc messages are also set up so the receptionist can quickly inform the patients if the surgery is on time or not.
This service gives the patients a relaxed signage system with pertinent information. There is also an override facility. If there is an incident e.g.: the recent swine flu outbreak, then HQ can override scheduled content to show the emergency content. Ad Hoc is also used to localise the layout i.e the name of the surgery etc.
The main implementation issues involved included:
- Overcoming security issues – With the obvious issues of patient confidentiality, security was of paramount importance. With the excellent security features of ONELAN’s NTBs any concerns were soon overcome. ONELAN is even approved for use in high security applications such as finance in Government and Banking.
- Overcoming user reluctance – It was essential that the NTB software interface was simple enough for NHS staff to use so they could update the information being displayed on the Net-Top-Boxes without any prior training. At the same time, the software had to be sophisticated to meet the requirements of the Trust Head Office for high quality professional signage content.
- Surgery Network Conformity – As every surgery has its own non standardised network, while the Trust Head Office is able to publish information on all the NTBs in every surgery, it wished to outsource the monitoring of all the NTBs. OneMedia provide this service and forward periodic reports back to the Trust Head Office.
