Case Study: Brigham & Women’s Hospital achieves rapid COVID-19 preparedness and safer patient & staff navigation with Purple

How Brigham & Women’s Hospital responded to the threat of COVID-19 with Senior Architect Planner, Andrew Shinn

Brigham & Women’s Hospital, one of Harvard’s largest teaching hospitals, faced a sudden COVID-19 surge that required rapid operational changes — converting inpatient units into ICU-level spaces, closing and reassigning entrances for controlled screening, and standing up remote testing and staff respite rooms. To manage patient and staff circulation and to reflect these fast-changing protocols, the hospital worked with Purple on updated wayfinding.

Purple pushed real-time wayfinding updates to reflect closed entrances, staff-only routes, remote testing locations and newly created wellness/respite rooms, with changes going live in minutes. Those updates helped route hundreds of concurrent patients to proper screened entry points, reduced confusion for frontline staff, and made newly converted respite rooms easy to find — demonstrating quick, measurable improvements in patient flow and staff navigation during the peak of the crisis.

Brigham & Women’s Hospital

Andrew Shinn

Senior Architect Planner