August 4th, 2026
A patient walking into a 400,000-square-foot medical campus for the first time isn’t thinking about square footage. They’re thinking about getting to their appointment on time, finding the right elevator bank, and not adding one more stressor to an already difficult day.
That’s the problem Atrium Health set out to solve when it opened Kenilworth Medical Plaza in midtown Charlotte, North Carolina — and it’s why wayfinding systems became part of the building’s design instead of a problem to solve after the ribbon-cutting.
A Quarter-Billion-Dollar Facility, and a Very Human Problem
Atrium Health’s Kenilworth Medical Plaza I and II represent a quarter-billion-dollar investment in advanced cardiovascular care, research, and wellness services for the Charlotte region. The more than 400,000-square-foot facility houses the Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute, spread across five floors that include cardiovascular imaging, a cardiac rehabilitation and wellness center, a demonstration kitchen for healthy cooking classes, and the Center for Sports Cardiology, a collaboration between Sanger and Atrium Health Musculoskeletal Institute.
Bringing that many specialty services under one roof is the point of an integrated care model: fewer unnecessary referrals, fewer emergency visits, better outcomes. But consolidation creates its own logistical problem. Patients moving between imaging, rehab, and a cardiology consult in the same visit are also moving between buildings, floors, and elevator banks — often while managing a health condition that makes that harder, not easier.
Atrium Health’s team identified the specific friction points early:
- Multiple entry points and elevators made navigation overwhelming
- Patients with limited mobility were struggling to find destinations without help
- Help desks staffed at every entrance were a real cost
- Missed or late appointments worked against the operational efficiency
The building built for integrated, patient-centered care needed a way to actually get patients to their care appointments.
Wayfinding Systems Built Around the Patient, Not the Building
Atrium Health partnered with 22Miles to deploy a digital wayfinding solution running on Intel NUC Mini PCs and managed through the 22Miles visual experience platform, DX Pro™. The two teams designed the system around healthcare’s specific accessibility and patient-experience requirements, not a generic directory template:
Ten interactive kiosks sit at the facility’s highest-traffic entry points and elevator hubs, giving patients a place to reorient the moment they arrive rather than guessing which hallway to try. From there, step-by-step navigation carries them from building to building and floor to floor. Mobile wayfinding lets a patient scan a code at the kiosk and continue the same route on their own phone, which is also useful for hygiene and for anyone who’d rather take their directions on the go.
ADA-compliant screen-flip functionality brings the map and keyboard within reach for wheelchair users, and routing itself is optimized for limited-mobility paths rather than assuming everyone takes the same route. Multilingual support extends the same clarity to patients whose first language isn’t English. Behind the scenes, analytics dashboards give facilities staff real-time insight into how people actually move through the building, informing both day-to-day resource placement and how future spaces get designed.
The kiosks run on 22Miles’ visual experience platform, DX Pro, which pairs wayfinding with the same content management and device oversight tools IT and facilities teams already rely on for digital signage, all under one dashboard instead of a separate system for every screen in the building. That combination of self-service navigation, accessibility built in rather than added on, and a mobile option for patients who want it, is what separates wayfinding systems that actually reduce stress from ones that just look good in a lobby rendering.
At VA Loma Linda Healthcare, a comparable hospital environment, interior designer Joe Bou Harb described the deployment, “22Miles managed our deployment professionally from start to finish. The project came in on schedule, and the platform performed exactly as promised.” The pattern Bou Harb describes, a system that works the way it was promised to on a timeline hospitals can actually plan around, is the same standard Kenilworth Medical Plaza was built to meet.
What Changes When Patients Stop Getting Lost
The results are less about the technology and more about what the technology frees people up to do. Patients and visitors now arrive at appointments on time and with less stress, which matters for treatment consistency in a cardiovascular care setting where missed windows aren’t a small inconvenience.
Help-desk staffing that used to be spread across every entrance can be reduced, freeing employees to focus on patients who need more than directions and preventing burnout. And the arrival experience is now clear and accessible, matching the state-of-the-art care model Atrium built Kenilworth to deliver, rather than undercutting it with a confusing front door. Atrium expects the long-term benefits to extend further, into resource utilization, cost efficiency, and patient satisfaction, as the analytics data accumulates.
This success required treating navigation as part of the clinical experience, not a facility’s afterthought. A 400,000-square-foot building with five floors of specialty care is only as good as a patient’s ability to actually get to the right room, on time, without help they shouldn’t have to ask for.
If your own campus is running into the same problem, buildings that keep expanding faster than patients can navigate them, it’s worth looking at what a purpose-built wayfinding system actually needs to do in a healthcare environment before evaluating vendors.
Our team at 22Miles would love to help you improve your healthcare facility’s patient navigation. Book a demo with us so we can walk you through what that means for your unique staff, patients, and building layout.
