Top Waiting Room Digital Signage Systems: Finding the Best

We all know that a good waiting experience can lead to a great visitor experience. And great visitor experience is the surefire way to get incredible online reviews. So, what are you doing to make the experience great?

The Best Customer Experience

Your visitors’ experiences begin in your waiting room, and what you have in the waiting room can influence patient/customer mindset for their entire visit. If you stumbled upon this article through an online search, you probably already had it in your mind to employ a digital signage system. Digital signage is exactly what it sounds like; a sign that displays on a digital screen instead of being a static print.

Digital signage systems use televisions to display your messages, text, images and even videos for your videos to see. But not all systems are created equal. In fact, most of them are known to create a repetitive experience that leaves a negative impression on your guests.

People enjoy watching TV. The vast majority of Americans spend multiple hours a week in front of their TVs, because they want to watch. But even though digital signage is seen on TV, it’s not TV. At least, not the TV people would look forward to watching.

When’s the last time you said, “I’m going to go sit down and watch a sign”?

Probably never.

So why would you force your visitors to watch a sign as they wait? Especially when they are forming their opinions about their experience from the moment they walk in.

“Oh, well our patients barely even wait, they are only there for a few minutes”
We’ve heard that one a lot. But even if everything goes perfectly and your patients are only waiting just a few minutes, why not give them the best experience possible? 3-minutes of enjoyment certainly beats 3-minutes of boredom.

This is why we recommend looking at Custom TV over Digital Signage. Custom TV can integrate all of the things you wanted to get out of Digital Signage, and more, while keeping TV on the TV.

Custom TV for Businesses, Offices, and Waiting Areas

The pioneers of Custom TV can be found at a company called It’s Relevant TV. Based just outside of New York City, It’s Relevant licensed top television programs and effortlessly combines them with your own messaging, images and videos. It gives your visitors the best of both worlds; the ability to see and understand what you want them to, while having a positive experience from the start with great programming they will enjoy. They even have self-install kits that make it easy to transform your TV without any advanced technical knowledge.

Best Waiting Room TV Software for Medical Offices

Looking for the best waiting room TV software for your medical office? The trick isn’t finding the self-proclaimed “best” TV software that’s out there; it’s creating an experience that is truly the best fit for you, your patients, and your medical office. This article will outline the most important features you should be looking for in your medical office TV and signage.

What Makes the Best Waiting Room TV Software, the “Best?”

The most effective waiting room TV software is one that is tailored to your own unique waiting room environment. How do you know if the TV software you’re currently looking at is the best for you? First, you have to identify what you’re hoping to get out of it. But generally speaking, you want something that is entertaining and engaging. You want your waiting room television to be aesthetically pleasing and brand-tailored – with the ability to upload your own personal videos and messaging. Equally as important is a TV solution that is cost-effective, and easy-to-manage. These are the top 5 things to keep in mind when looking for the best TV display software for your medical office.

However, knowing what to look for is only half the battle; finding all of these features in one single TV package is next. Which, actually, isn’t that difficult – because one solution: It’s Relevant TV, has all of the features listed above, and more.

It’s Relevant TV Features Entertaining & Engaging Content

It’s Relevant TV features the world’s largest library of licensed content, giving users access to over half-a-million videos for visitors to enjoy. Each piece of content is screened by live human beings to ensure that everything is family-friendly, and nothing unsettling or inappropriate ever plays on your TV.

It’s Relevant is not a playlist.

Other digital TV software providers will try to pass off things like a 10-minute, 30-minute, 1-hour, 3-hour, or 5-hour loop of videos as “premium TV content” – It’s Relevant TV doesn’t loop. It streams new videos every hour from a list of 40+ categories you pick and choose from. Categories like Cooking, Sports, Automotive, News, and even Trivia. Additionally, the whole system is fully customizable, with the ability to upload your own personal messaging on the side, during, or in between content.

It’s Relevant TV is Easy-to-Watch

A number of waiting room TV software solutions try to cram too much onto the screen at once. As useful as the information you may be putting on the screen is, it doesn’t have to be visible 100% of the time. Having too much promotional or “educational” content in a row is actually a turn off to most visitors. It can also get out of hand fast and make the TV look like a gimmicky widget- almost as if you were showing a website instead of a TV channel. That might work for a menuboard at a restaurant that is only seen for a minute, but not a medical office where visitors are spending 3+ minutes.

It’s Relevant TV is not website for your TV, nor is it a collection of widgets.

IRTV is structured in such a way that it’s modest, nice-looking, and easy on the eyes. Most importantly, it’s designed so that visitors notice what matters; the messaging. Whether it’s videos that you upload, image-ads on the side, or text scrolling throughout, It’s Relevant is all about making your messaging effective. It delivers things like news headlines and the weather – but in a way that doesn’t overstimulate your viewers or give them a headache. Never forget that a little goes a long way.

It’s Relevant TV is Tailored to your Brand

It’s Relevant is a custom TV network that works for your brand. Your logo, your videos, and your messaging can all be uploaded into the system and featured on the TV. Whether you want the TV to play exclusively your branded-content, or you want a mix of personal + IRTV content; you’re the boss.

In the case of medical offices, when you mix medical content, personal videos, or educational segments with It’s Relevant’s fun and interesting content, visitors will stay tuned longer and be more receptive to your messaging.

It’s Relevant TV is Cost-Effective

FREE WAITING ROOM TV SOFTWARE!

There’s no red flag bigger than a waiting room TV service that’s advertised as “free.“ Nothing’s free – except food samples at Costco (actually those aren’t free either as you have to pay a membership to get in). If you’re interested in a good reason as to why a free TV service is a bad idea, the following article will give you 5; “Top 5 Reasons a Free TV Service is Bad for your Medical Practice.” In short, you get what you pay for.

While It’s Relevant TV is not “free,” it often times costs less than cable and is designed to generate additional revenue for your practice. It’s designed to fit your marketing budget, and make those marketing dollars count. Whether you’re a hospital, urgent care, dentist office, or a medical specialist; every little bit helps, and It’s Relevant’s ROI helps offset the cost.

It’s Relevant TV is Easy-to-Manage

It’s Relevant TV couldn’t be easier to control. Users are able to adjust settings, upload videos, and manage all of their content from anywhere with virtually any internet-connected computer, tablet or smartphone. The It’s Relevant iOS app for iPhone and iPad provides a straightforward way to make changes to individual, or multiple TVs at once; across multiple locations. The convenience of being able to make changes from anywhere, at any time, with such ease, is a breath of fresh air for users who aren’t so tech-savvy.

If you still own a flip phone and don’t like interacting with technology yourself, It’s Relevant TV includes a Client Success Manager at no additional charge with every subscription plan. This person is available to make changes for you, and even help with graphic design and strategies for getting the most out of your TV.

It’s Relevant TV is the Best Fit for Waiting Rooms

It’s Relevant is a fully-customizable TV network which combines the best aspects of television and digital signage. It provides medical offices across the country with safe, family-friendly content that visitors actually enjoy watching, and mixes that content with your own branded videos and promotions.

Could It’s Relevant work for your waiting room? Visit itsrelevant.com or schedule a demo if you have questions or would like to know more.

Medical Office TV – Where Waiting Presents an Opportunity

It’s Relevant has been working with urgent cares, dentists, and medical offices across the country in order to improve patient experience by doing more with the TVs in their waiting rooms. When it comes to medical offices there aren’t a lot of television options for waiting rooms, and any practice that strives to put patients first will often invest in a waiting area TV service of some kind.

Choosing the Right Service.

Medical lobby TVs should never settle for basic cable. Between the dwell time of patients, and the amount of people that come in and out of the office on any given day, there’s a lot of opportunities to expose them to your brand, services, and reasons for them to come back – none of which is taken advantage of when cable is in the picture. Digital sinage software like It’s Relevant TV gives you the freedom to customize the TV in your waiting room, and is the ideal service when trying to make your waiting room more inviting.

Why the TV?

TVs are a great way to engage with people because you don’t have to tell someone to look at the screen for them to notice what’s on. With TVs being as prevalent as they are, people are used to watching them. Televisions are familiar and catch the eye better than posters, banners, or signs ever could.

Patients wait in waiting rooms. Hence the namesake. They wait to be seen and the wait can be a long one. During that time, if there is a TV present in the room then it’s fair game to assume that someone is going to look at it at some point. This is your prime opportunity. As they watch and you have their attention, you can be messaging to them.

What’s on the TV?

In the case of waiting rooms, the TVs we have seen are most often tuned to the news or some light programming with the patients’ comfort in mind. In practice this is a good gesture. However, in an age of rising technology, there exists an alternative. You can still offer patients comfort, but bring more for your practice at the same time.

It’s Relevant TV offers more than cable.

Cable is great for use at home. The programming that airs on television is intended for the comfort of living rooms where people sit down with the vested interest of watching TV. With the exception of the news, the average runtime of content on TV ranges from 30-60 minutes with an engaging plot or storyline. People in waiting rooms aren’t there to watch these shows. It doesn’t fit with the structure of a waiting room, whereas It’s Relevant’s TV’s short-form content is designed with the brief waiting period of patients in mind. IRTV provides short-form shows that are engaging and informative. They are the sort of thing you can walk away from with something interesting to talk about.

Medical Waiting Room TV: What Are You Telling Your Patients?

With the decreasing costs of television screens, medical offices across the nation are installing more and more of them. Practices put TVs in both waiting areas and treatment rooms to help patients pass the time as they wait. But what exactly are these TVs doing for the practices that are hosting them? And as a practice owner, manager, or administrator, have you taken careful consideration in choosing what to display on them?

It’s an unfortunate reality that most medical offices have put very little thought into the programming on their screens. One of the most common reasons for having a TV is to help patients relax and pass the time, but certain types of content can do quite the opposite; creating an anxious environment and making it feel as though things are moving even slower.

Cable TV and Medical Networks

A large number of waiting room televisions are simply tuned to local cable stations and broadcast channels. These show hourly round-ups of mundane, recirculated news, unpleasant accidents, or otherwise pointless stories, soap operas, daytime courtroom battles, and semi-offensive talk shows. Howver; other medical-related options that seem forward-thinking on the surface can have an even worse affect. There are a host of medical-related TV products that bombard patients with irrelevant health content. These are paid for by ad services designed to subliminally sell their products to your patients.

What’s worse, your visitors might be tricked into thinking that they have a condition which doesn’t exist!

Either of these scenarios can present real problems for your practice. What started as an idea to make your waiting room a more inviting and comfortable space can actually backfire if you haven’t paid attention to what’s playing.

Taking Control with a Custom TV System

As a practice manager it’s important to be aware, and in control of what’s on your televisions. This sounds like a tall order, but with new solutions just released on the market, it is becoming easy. You can quickly control not only the programming, but also add some messaging to help the practice itself.

One such service is It’s Relevant TV. The subscription service allows you to choose from a catalog of 50 topic areas, including stories gathered by well known producers like National Geographic, Food Channel, Minute Science, HowCast, and Medical Minute, allowing you to decide what your patients see while they wait to see you. You can mix things like national news, sports and celebrity interviews, with cooking shows, pets and travel videos. A team of editors filters all of the content, assuring that each episode is family-friendly and office appropriate.

Michele Mirabel, community engagement director at Doctors Express Urgent Care said, “We have compared different opportunities of what we were going to provide in our waiting room. We chose It’s Relevant [TV] because it gave us diversity in the content that was being played. If it was just continuous medical coverage from pharmaceutical groups and on how to treat different ailments, not only is it uninteresting [to the patients] but it can also be anxiety and fear provoking. We really take pride in creating the right environment. From our staff, to the cleanliness of our place, to the information people are getting when they walk in the door.”

Promoting Your Practice on TV

That’s only part of it. On top of the content that is provided; you, as the practive, can promote your services, products and community involvement as well. Images, videos, and live social media tools get yout messaging across in a subtle way as your patients watch. Almost anything you can create on a smart device, you can upload quickly to your TV screens.

Joyce Ramirez, a Marketing Director at AFC Urgent Care said, “One of the challenges of marketing for an Urgent Care center is that it is not a primary care office and it’s also not a hospital. What I liked about It’s Relevant is that we’re able to showcase the services we provide. We’re not talking about blood pressure screenings and diabetes screenings because those are really for long term care, we’re really short term care. So we’re able to talk about travel vaccinations, immigration physicals, DOT physicals. We’re really able to convey the message of what we treat and the services we provide.”

It’s Relevant TV has been working with many medical and dental clients across the country. Managers love the professionalism the family-friendly content brings to their waiting room. They love how they can update their patients on their latest products and services, with a lower cost than most cable subscriptions.

Television screens can make a big difference in your practice, from higher review scores to increased patient referrals. But it takes the right programming prescription to be sure it’s a positive one.

It’s Relevant TV serves medical and dental offices across the country as well as a host of other hospitality businesses. For more information please visit: http://www.itsrelevant.com/medical