ViewMedica Alternatives for Waiting Room TV – VMCast Reviews

Looking for an alternative to ViewMedica for your medical waiting room TV? We’ve summarized the top choices below.

Whether you’re a hospital, medical office, urgent care, doctor, dentist, or specialist, having a quality TV service provider in your waiting room is very important. Many people who had used the ViewMedica VMCast system in the past are looking for alternatives that provide a more content-rich experience. They are looking to achieve better patient engagement and visitor satisfaction with a different TV provider. Let’s take a look at the 3 types of TV services available to medical offices today:

#1 Custom Television Network

A custom television network is a relatively new technology. It’s a platform that delivers a variety of TV programming (that you can control), combined with the ability to message to your patients. Your messaging can take many forms; from your own videos and commercials to “digital signage” imagery, and programmable text on the screen. The Custom TV Network, pioneered by companies like It’s Relevant TV, keep television on the television, combine it will messaging, and provides ample control to the medical practice.

#2 Medical Information TV / Digital Signage

Medical Information TV provides a limited library of medical content, typically geared at medical specialties. At first glance these services, including ViewMedica, seem like a great match for a medical waiting room, but a closer examination of patient feedback shows that the content could use a boost. The goal of these services is to “educate your patients”, but if your patients aren’t engaged enough to watch the TV it’s really had to get that done.

The videos play on loop and can get very repetitive for patients sitting in front of them for any length of time. For this reason patients tend to “tune out” fairly quickly. They’d rather browse social media on their phones than watch a TV filled with only medical content and advertising for the practice.

Medical Information TV providers typically charge for access to videos and may charge extra per video you want to use. Some providers place pharmaceutical ads on your television that may become a source of added stress or anxiety for your patients.

#3 Cable Television

Cable TV is the service most often used in medical environments across the U.S. Cable lacks the ability to control anything other than choosing the channel you are on in any given moment. Competitive advertisements, inappropriate content and more can come across a cable TV broadcast. And short of advertising on cable, you can’t put your own messaging on the TV.

Best ViewMedica Alternative

While ViewMedica’s library of medical videos on demand is very much appreciated by doctors and specialists, you can do better than ViewMedica’s VM Cast service in your waiting room. Playing a small selection of medical videos that may not be relevant to your patients, over and over as they wait is a surefire way to lower patient satisfaction. Instead we recommend a custom television solution like It’s Relevant TV. Keeping the content relevant is crucially important for better visitor experience and online reviews.

Utilizing ViewMedica in the exam room, on a tablet for instance, is a great way to have videos on demand to show your patients. But it’s just not as good of a fit for the waiting room.

It’s much wiser to use a service that focuses solely on waiting room TV to provide the best patient experience, instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Relevance is key to keep engagement high. Check out It’s Relevant TV and Rele.tv for truly relevant solutions for medical waiting room environments.

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.

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