LOST NO MORE

Memorial Hermann is testing the Find My Way app to guide patients from home to hospital

W ho among us has not lost their car, their sense of direction and/ or their mind navigating the maze of medical parking garages or the endless hospital hallways around Houston?

Relax, there’s an app for that.

Memorial Hermann Health System has launched a spiffy pilot program called Find My Way, which lets users turn their phone into a tracking device that takes them from their front door, through traffic and to the parking garage closest to their appointment. It records their parking place (crucial for the sievebrained) and guides them to their doctor’s office and then back to their car.

“Patients and families are already highly stressed. The last thing we want is for them to be lost, too,” said Allen Tseng, chief operating officer for Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center, where the directional phone app is being tested.

At the Memorial City complex alone there are five parking garages, four medical plazas and a major hospital with two towers stretching across 5 million square feet. What could possibly go wrong?

These days hospitals are being held accountable for their patients’ satisfaction with federal Medicare reimbursements sometimes tied to results of surveys. Tseng said one complaint that often surfaces is the confusion patients feel trying to find their way around, especially as medical campuses seem to sprout and grow overnight.

So Memorial Hermann hooked up with Connexient, a New York-based company that develops “wayfinding” directional

software that can be loaded for free onto a smartphone. He declined to specify how much the project cost, conceding only “it’s expensive.”

While a handful of hospitals across the nation have rolled out similar programs to help the misplaced, Memorial Hermann’s Memorial City campus is the first in Houston to do so. About 1,900 bluetooth beacons were installed in every nook and cranny across the complex to pick up the signal as people forge their way toward their doctor — or even the nearest elevator.

In the first month, there have been 1,000 downloads. Tseng said if it works as hoped — including cutting down on people being late for checkins — it could spread to other Memorial Hermann locations, including in the

Michael Ciaglo / Houston Chronicle Traffic backs up along Gessner around the Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center. “Patients and families are already highly stressed. The last thing we want is for them to be lost, too,” chief operating officer Allen Tseng says.

Memorial Hermann’s Memorial City campus is the first in Houston to create a navigation program.

Michael Ciaglo / Houston Chronicle The program may help patients arrive on time.