Central Baptist Hospital: Visitors See 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 digital signage software, the hospital today has nearly 30 LCD displays in waiting rooms, lobbies and meeting areas throughout its facilities, 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 digital signage provided them exactly the solution they needed. “AxisTV pushes content out to our media 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 Software. “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 zones and you can put in any number. Some have four content zones, some have a ticker, 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.

“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.”