A Guideline for an Outpatient Guidance System for Use in General Hospitals

This paper presents a guideline for a hospital guidance system that provides outpatients with guidance about their process and location. When visiting general hospitals, outpatients often encounter difficulties in understanding the hospital process and in knowing where to go next during that process. To address this issue, we initially conducted an ethnographic interview of fifteen outpatients to determine their needs, interviewed hospital staff to discover exceptional cases, and then analyzed the hospital process for outpatients to uncover any timing difficulties so as to specify the proposed guidance service. Considering the findings of the user study and the result of a domain analysis, we formulated the outpatient guidance service. The outpatient guidance system is presented here as an example.