Riverside Medical Center Wayfinding

Coalport, Ohio · 340 beds · Interior wayfinding and exterior identification · 14 months

Riverside had grown by addition since 1961. Six connected structures, four numbering conventions, two floors called the second floor at different elevations, and a main entrance that had moved twice without the signage following. Staff navigated by memory and visitors navigated by asking staff.

Directory panel from the delivered programme, modular inserts in an extruded frame.

The actual problem

The hospital came to us for new signs. What it needed first was a decision about what the buildings and floors were called. No amount of legible signage resolves two second floors.

We spent three weeks on the nomenclature study, most of it walking the building with the front desk staff, security officers and volunteer guides, recording the questions visitors asked and the words they used. Two findings drove the whole programme. First, almost nobody arriving knew which building they wanted — they knew a department name or a doctor's name. Second, the internal department names on the existing signage frequently were not the names on the appointment letters patients were holding.

The signage was not wrong so much as it was answering a question nobody was asking. Visitors did not need to know they were in the Hendricks Pavilion. They needed to know that Imaging was on the floor above.

What we changed

Buildings were re-lettered A through F, replacing donor and memorial names in navigational use; the commemorative names were retained on dedication plaques at each entrance, which mattered to the foundation and cost nothing. Floors were renumbered against a single datum, so the second floor is the second floor everywhere. Department names on signage were changed to match the language on patient correspondence, and the correspondence templates were updated in the two cases where the department name was genuinely better.

The hardware was straightforward once the naming was settled: extruded aluminium frames with replaceable digitally printed inserts, a directory at each of the three public entrances, directionals at every decision point on the primary routes, and photopolymer room identification throughout.

Working around a live hospital

Nothing could close. Installation ran in three phases over eleven months, scheduled corridor by corridor with the facilities team, mostly between 7pm and 5am. Each work area was tented with a portable containment unit and negative air, and every installer completed the hospital's contractor infection-control orientation before starting.

Wall penetrations were coordinated against the as-builts to avoid medical gas lines, and where the drawings were unreliable — which in the 1961 structure was most places — we scanned before drilling. That added time and avoided the one mistake nobody recovers from cheaply.

Where it went wrong

Phase two slipped five weeks. A cardiology service line reorganised midway through the project, which invalidated eleven directional messages and one directory panel after fabrication. Because the inserts are modular the physical cost was minor — twelve inserts and a day of labour — but the approval cycle for the revised message schedule took most of those five weeks.

The lesson we took, and now apply to every healthcare programme, is to ask early which service lines are under active reorganisation, and to fabricate those areas last regardless of the geographic sequence.

Result

Interior signs1,180
Directories3 public, 6 departmental
Exterior2 monuments, 14 vehicular directionals
Duration14 months, 3 phases

The hospital reported a reduction in wayfinding questions at the main desk in the six months after phase three, measured against a tally the volunteer team had been keeping since before the project. We have since delivered two additional phases as new construction came online, matched to the original extrusion and colour formula held on file.