The Doylestown (PA) hospital serves residents of Pennsylvania’s Bucks and Montgomery Counties, which are part of Philadelphia’s northern suburbs, as well as New Jersey’s Hunterdon and Mercer Counties. Founded in 1923 by the Village Improvement Assn., a community women’s group, Doylestown Hospital maintains 247 beds and employs more than 400 physicians certified in more than 40 specialties.
It’s also earned HealthGrades’ Outstanding Patient Experience Award, which is bestowed to facilities rated in the top 5% among patients surveyed from nearly 4,000 hospitals nationwide, for four consecutive years. Doylestown Hospital has also earned HealthGrades’ Patient Safety Excellence Awards for three consecutive years, and is one of only 18 hospitals in the nation to have earned that many commendations.
In keeping with the hospital’s commitment to an optimal customer experience, it hired L&H Companies (Reading, PA) to create new monument signage and a garage-wayfinding system. Scott Long, L&H’s senior designer, said the job was earned through its reputation and its patented Patient Care sign system.
Users of and visitors to healthcare facilities often endure very stressful situations, and appropriate signage can help those under strain reach their destinations more easily. He said L&H decorated the wayfinding signs with various high-performance, translucent and opaque vinyls, and used perforated, black media on the program’s illuminated directional elements. The graphics were created in CorelDRAW™ and cut on a Graphtec plotter.
To create the garage graphics, which identity the elevator areas and provide a visual backdrop for the structure’s four floors, Long developed textual graphics, silhouette figures and a circle-pattern backdrop using CorelDraw and Adobe® Photoshop® and Illustrator®. While designing the program, he accounted for ground-level concrete pillars and overhead crossbeams, pipe stacks and other infrastructure to ensure key graphic elements weren’t obscured.
L&H printed approximately 500 sq. ft. of graphics on 3M’s Controltac material on a Mimaki JV3-160SP solvent-ink printer or Dilli Neo Titan combination, UV-ink printer. 3M’s 8519 luster-finish overlaminate, pressure-applied with a GBC Titan 165 pressure laminator, protects the brightly colored graphics, which were heat-gun applied.
A painted, 3-D, aluminum medallion identifies each garage level.