Central
Baptist Hospital: Visitors Seeing The Bigger Picture
How to better reach
visitors with news about hospital services? That’s what the
administration and the marketing department of Central Baptist Hospital
in Lexington, Kentucky asked of its Audio Visual Services department.
As part of the Baptist
Healthcare System, the hospital had existing marketing content—TV ads,
posters, and other printed materials—but they thought they could reach a
more targeted audience by cross-marketing and speaking directly to
visitors with digital signage in common areas like lobbies, reception
areas and waiting rooms.
When the teams first
talked about it, everyone agreed that new media would be ideal, but they
thought it might be prohibitively demanding. “You can imagine if you’re
streaming video constantly out to multiple monitors what kind of a
bandwidth hog that would be for the network,” said Audio Visual Services
Manager David Saier.
Yet thanks to AxisTV,
the hospital today has nearly 30 LCD displays in waiting rooms, lobbies
and meeting areas throughout its facilities, ranging from 22 inches to
54 inches in size, and the administration, IT, education and marketing
departments couldn’t be happier with their decision. For Saier, the
advantages are easy to summarize. “AxisTV gives you timely release of
information, the flexibility of video, and it allows you to change your
message more frequently than if you were doing a print campaign.”
Saier explained how
AxisTV provided them exactly the solution they needed. “AxisTV pushes
content out to our channel players and they push it directly to displays
so that it doesn’t overly burden our IT network,” said Saier. “Only when
our content changes does any data have to go onto the network.”
Much of the content
comes from video advertisements created for mass marketing campaigns. In
addition, the hospital easily integrated AxisTV with its event
management system, EMS Enterprise™ by Dean Evans and Associates. “If we
have events taking place, like classes, trainings or public events, that
scheduling is displayed as part of the system,” offered Saier. “And it’s
automated. Every time we schedule a meeting and confirm it, it then
becomes part of a list that’s displayed automatically.”
But the feature that
draws most of Saier’s praise is AxisTV’s flexibility in layout. “We
create content blocks and you can put in any number. Some have four
content blocks, some have a crawl, and some have one big image. We might
have a logo in one corner, a display of meetings for that day, and then
at the bottom weather information. It really gives you the flexibility
to make that decision yourself.”
Central Baptist recently
updated to a newer version of AxisTV, and Saier is looking at features
that push content to employee desktops for improved internal
communication, as well as utilizing the alert channel for instructions
in case of an emergency like a fire or natural disaster. More
ambitiously, they’re looking into expanding the system throughout their
six-hospital network and ancillary medical facilities throughout
Kentucky.
Saier said it would be a
large-scale effort, but he’s optimistic about implementation.
“Integration was really simple. All we had to do was let two servers
talk to each other and schedule updates. We configured the screen to the
size of text we wanted, how many lines, that kind of thing, and once we
did that - it really took care of itself.” Saier added, “Because we
have had such positive response, both from our employees and from the
general public, planning for the expansion is already well underway.”
