Projects: UK Hospital Network Adopts Smart Panels
March 23, 2014 by Dave Haynes
The Healthcare Messaging Group runs a communications service that publicizes essential healthcare, patient and hospital information on displays installed at primary locations within National Health Service hospitals in the UK, and the network has started cutting over to a solution that uses Samsung’s system on chip panels and Signagelive software.
The Patient Information Initiative is bankrolled in part by private sector companies that want to align themselves to key public health and hospital campaigns like Stoptober, Change4Life and Wear it Pink.
The initiative has over six years generated more than £1million of supplementary revenue for the hospitals. The network is at 15 major NHS Trusts across more than 30 hospital sites, and has approximately 150 patient information displays.
The network all runs on Signagelive’s platform, but to trim costs new sites are now using a set-up that cuts out the need for external media players.
Going over to an embedded solution lets the NHS “make optimal use of their limited funding because they do not need to purchase or install any onsite hardware,” says Ian Gabbie, Commercial Director of The Healthcare Messaging Group. “Hospitals can use the displays to fulfill their requirement to keep patients informed about important information. They also use them to publicize health-related product and services in an eye catching yet unobtrusive way.”
Interesting to see what looks to be a substantial network take on the system on chip platform. I don’t think Samsung or any panel company that has gone down this path has so far seen the kind of major sales action they’d like to see, and there’s a bunch of reasons for that – like ease of adoption and integration, processor/graphics speed and peddling something pretty much unproven.
Samsung, I hear, has a 2nd Gen product that addresses at least some of the issues coming out in Q2.
Disclosure: I did some work with Samsung about a year ago as they were developing SoC vendor partnerships. Not active on that now.
16 months and 20+ trade shows later, the first SmartSignage deal, and it turns out to be a retrofit of an existing network. That is some ROI for the “partner”. The trouble is that there will be one more retrofit: when Samsung cuts signagelive’s wires and takes the software portion for themselves. Bank on that by this time next year.
Dave,
I’m surprised that you’re allowing anonymous comments on your site.
To the cloaked individual behind the snipe: this is one of many customers – new and existing – that have seen the value of the Samsung/Signagelive proposition, dozens of which are live now.
As you know, a product’s success and failure is not judged in one year’s time. Signagelive is the only global software company that has a fully commercialized product available across multiple territories through distribution, all methodically completed over the last 15 months.
Anyone who would like to learn more about the solution that’s keeping our competitors cowering behind anonymity, please contact me:
Raffi Vartian – raffi (at) signagelive.com