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Dr. Bridget Duffy, who was formerly the Chief Experience Officer at the Cleveland Clinic, is one of a handful of people who are truly focused on all aspects of the patient experience, and she has some great ideas about what is wrong with the way patients, hospitals, and doctors relate to one another in our healthcare system. We previously featured a video of a brief interview with her at the 2007 Consumer-Centric Healthcare Congress.

In this new video, recorded at the Gel Health Conference last month in New York, she relates some of her own experiences as a patient with a broken leg, and then discusses her ideas for redesigning the healthcare system by listening to the voice of the patient.

The presentation doesn’t include anything directly related to wayfinding, and it is much heavier on anecdotes than specific data or recommendations, but if you you work regularly in hospitals you will certainly find some inspiration here, as well as a renewed sense of what the end users of our work are facing as they navigate both the physical hospital environment and the emotional issues surrounding their own illness.

Many complex facilities focus their efforts to improve wayfinding on the “real world” — physical signs to guide people in and around the environment. But even the most wayfinding-savvy organizations often do not extend their reach into the “digital world,” where many of their visitors start their journey.

Here are ten ways to deliver better wayfinding information online:

1. Provide an easy way for visitors to your web site to generate customized direction sets to or from your facility. Whether you offer an offsite link to a mapping web site like Google or Yahoo, or you invest the resources to create a customized tool on your own site, it is very helpful to visitors to be able to print accurate driving directions from their home to your campus.

2. Review the main mapping sites and confirm that they are providing accurate directions to your location. Google, Mapquest and Yahoo rely on third-party providers of street information and sometimes they can contain errors, such as incorrect street names or traffic flows. Each site offers ways to alert their providers about mistakes. Test getting directions to your address from different parts of town.

3. Explain parking options on your web site. If you have multiple parking options, like lots or garages and valet parking, list them all on your site, along with hours of operations and fees. Help your visitors determine the most convenient parking option for their destination.

4. Convey information about public transit options and private offerings such as intra-campus shuttles. Link to public transportation trip-planning sites, if available in your area.

5. Offer a version of your web site optimized for mobile browsing. With browser recognition, your web site can be optimized to deliver a mobile-friendly version for cell phone users. As we’ve said in a previous post, everyone now carries their own personal wayfinding device — the cell phone. Confirm that your visitors can find relevant information on their phones as they approach your facility or at your facility.

6. List all your street addresses on a single line, such as “500 Chicon, Austin TX 78702″ so that they can be easily pasted into a mapping application.

7. Alert your visitors about street closures and construction that may impede their journey to your facility. Alerts should be prominently placed on your web site and updated regularly.

8. For complex facilities and campuses, provide walking directions from parking to the visitor’s destination. Often the most frustrating part of a journey to a new facility is finding your way from parking into the right building and up the right elevator.

9. Offer information on popular amenities in the wayfinding section of your web site. Where can a visitor find food, a taxi stand or an ATM?

10. Maintain and update your wayfinding information on a regular schedule. Outdated information is worse than useless — it will negatively impact your visitors’ experience.

This interview with Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Bridget Duffy (conducted at last year’s Consumer-Centric Healthcare Congress) includes several points that are relevant to wayfinding. Shortly before this interview was conducted, Dr. Duffy was named Cleveland Clinic’s Chief Experience Officer, which in itself offers some insight into how seriously world-class institutions are now taking the issue of patient experience.

One of the most interesting points Dr. Duffy makes in the interview (at around 2:00) is regarding the importance of helping patients to navigate the healthcare “system.” Although she isn’t talking about navigating the physical environment as much as she is talking about making one’s way through all of the other things (scheduling, procedures, follow-up care) that patients and families have to deal with, it still has definite wayfinding implications.

That is because effective wayfinding systems, while traditionally focused on the navigation of physical environments, are now starting to play a role in this “systemic” navigation. Through the use of technology, such as self-service kiosks and wayfinding web sites that can be tied to hospital databases, and smarter use of static and dynamic signage, the traditional role of the wayfinding system is being expanded to include helping patients to understand what is happening to them at every at step of the process, and give them a sense of empowerment that will improve their experience, and hopefully their outcome as well.