Navigating a hospital can be as difficult as driving in a foreign country. The terrain is unfamiliar; the signs aren’t written in everyday vernacular; and the visitors are often under stress.

Visitors who are looking for a loved one at Sarasota’s Memorial Hospital in Florida, however, now have the aid of beacon technology to find their way around the campus, which spans six city blocks.

Beacons are small pieces of hardware that businesses can place anywhere to pinpoint the location of a visitor’s smartphone via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless networking technology that’s common on all newer smartphones. Businesses can use the technology to send messages to a consumer who has downloaded their app through the nearest beacon to her.

Sarasota Memorial is piloting five beacons that send visitors maps, as long as they have the hospital’s app on their phone and enable push notifications. The beacons are placed in high-traffic areas within the hospital, says Charles Westcott, the hospital’s webmaster. Locations include: the Courtyard Tower, emergency room entrance, radiology department entrance, the main elevator bank and the gift shop. Instead of a map, the gift shop beacon distributes a coupon for 10% off a purchase.

Once a visitor responds to the push notification by tapping on it, a map appears detailing the area where he is standing. The map shows the individual’s location as a blue dot, and also displays key areas where visitors typically want to go, such as washrooms, the information desk, navigation kiosks or a coffee station. They can zoom in on the map and save it on their phone for later use.

The map is static, Westcott says, so it will not update as visitors move around. The maps won’t lead visitors to the person they want to see, but they can see on the map where they should go to ask for help to get there. The beacons are also useful for patients who are staying at the hospital for a longer period of time and may want to move around, Westcott says.

By implementing the beacons, the hospital hopes to improve the experience for its visitors and make it easier for them to get around, especially for the younger visitors who often turn to technology first, Westcott says.

“We’re trying a different way of helping visitors,” Westcott says.

Although visitors can use the hospital’s free Wi-Fi and their smartphones’ GPS to navigate, GPS cannot decipher elevation. If beacons were on every level providing maps for visitors, this would solve that problem, Westcott says.

In the first four months after its launch in January, 2,261 visitors received a beacon notification, says Westcott.  The highest traffic areas were the elevators and the gift shop, as 40% of the messages were delivered to visitors at the elevator bank and 34% were in the gift shop. Unique visits per month are increasing 60% per month, Westcott says. Visitors get one push notification every time they walk by a beacon.

The beacons, manufactured by Gimbal Inc., have a range of about 10 feet and are slightly larger than a deck of cards. They battery life is around a year and half and they take double-A batteries.

Sarasota Memorial Hospital used software company MobileSmith Inc. to build the beacon technology into their app, which MobileSmith also rebuilt. It took three months to implement the beacons at the hospital. The contract was $10,000 and included additional resources from MobileSmith and Gimbal to produce the app, Westcott says.

Five months into the upgrade, 800 visitors downloaded the app, which is a native app for both iPhone and Android. So far the beacons are only compatible with iPhones, but the hospital hopes to update to both platforms later this year. To promote the app, the hospital is using paid campaigns on social media and signage at the hospital. Since the hospital already had an app and the technology was built into it, the hospital sent a push notification letting consumers know they needed to update their app. Once the hospital does a full beacon rollout, Westcott anticipates more visitors downloading the app.

The hospital also offers geo-fencing at some of its other facilities, such as the urgent care center. Visitors who enter the urgent care geo-fence will receive a welcome push notification.