Hospitals and Medical Centers
Multi-building campuses where patients arrive for a specific clinic, often for the first time, frequently with a mobility need.
Every visitor finds the right door.
A public web page the facility links to. A visitor searches for where they are going and gets a route on the map alongside written turn-by-turn directions, across floors and between buildings. No app, no login, no account.
Large campuses are hard to navigate.
A visitor arriving for an appointment can face several buildings, multiple entrances, and floors numbered differently from one wing to the next. The information that would help is usually printed on a wall, and the wall does not change when a department does.
Visitors arrive stressed and late
People navigating an unfamiliar campus are often already anxious about why they are there. Time spent lost is time taken from the appointment, and late arrivals cost the facility scheduled capacity.
Static signage goes stale
Departments move, wings are renovated, entrances close for construction. Printed directories stay wrong until somebody funds a reprint, and the reprint takes weeks.
Staff become the map
When signage falls short the burden shifts to whoever is nearest. Front desk, security, clinical staff, repeating the same directions all day instead of doing their own work.
What Hydra Wayfinder does
One public web page that answers a single question reliably: how do I get from where I am to where I need to be?
Campus and floor plan maps
A site-level view of the whole campus with building selection, and clean interactive floor plans for each level with a floor selector.
Destination search
Search departments, clinics, services, entrances, elevators, and parking by name. Search tolerates misspellings and common synonyms.
Turn-by-turn routing
Point-to-point guidance across floors and between buildings, drawn on the map and written as an ordered list of plain-language steps.
Accessible route option
One toggle recalculates the route to prefer elevators and step-free paths, so a visitor using a wheelchair or a walker gets a route they can actually take.
Entrance and parking guidance
Parking areas and entrances are mapped destinations, so directions can begin at the lot rather than at a lobby the visitor has not found yet.
You Are Here wall maps
High-resolution digital wall map files, each oriented to the viewer perspective at that physical location. Delivered as files for the customer to print and install.
Content management
Destinations, routes, entrances, and parking are edited through an administrative interface rather than a code deploy. When a clinic moves on Monday, the map is right on Monday.
Multi-campus by design
The platform is multi-tenant. An organization with several sites runs them on one platform, each campus with its own address and its own administrators.
Hosted and maintained
Delivered as a subscription. Hosting, updates, security patching, monitoring, and support are included. Nothing is installed on the customer network.
From floor plans to go-live
Implementation starts with customer-furnished floor plans and ends with a working public map the facility can point its visitors to.
Kickoff and schedule
Confirm scope, buildings and floors in play, points of contact, review milestones, and the delivery schedule.
Floor plan digitization
Customer-furnished plans are converted into clean, consistent, web-ready map layers drawn to a single visual standard.
Destination and route modeling
Departments, services, entrances, elevators, stairs, and parking are captured as searchable destinations, then connected by a routable network spanning floors and buildings.
Stakeholder review
A working draft goes to the facility. Corrections from the people who know the building are incorporated across review cycles before anything goes public.
Accessibility verification
Keyboard operation, screen reader behavior, contrast, text scaling, and the written directions path are tested against Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 Level AA before go-live.
Wall map production
You Are Here files are produced for each designated location, rotated to match what a person standing there actually sees.
Go-live and training
The facility publishes a link from its own website. Administrator documentation and hands-on training follow so staff can maintain the content themselves.
Accessibility, designed in.
A route drawn on a map communicates nothing to someone who cannot see it. It is easy to treat that as an edge case and bolt a text summary onto the end of a project, which is how written directions end up incomplete or missing the one turn that matters.
Hydra Wayfinder treats the written step list as a first-class representation of every route. The same routing engine produces the drawn line and the ordered steps, so the text can never drift out of sync with the map.
- Full keyboard operation with visible focus indicators. No interaction requires a pointer or a drag.
- Semantic markup and ARIA labeling so search, results, the floor selector, and the map are announced correctly by screen readers.
- Written turn-by-turn directions as a complete text alternative to the map canvas, not a summary of it.
- Contrast-checked color throughout the interface and the map, verified against WCAG 2.1 Level AA ratios.
- Scalable text that respects browser and operating system size settings without breaking layout.
- Optional spoken playback of directions in the browser, for visitors who would rather listen than read.
Campuses where visitors get lost
Government Campuses
Federal, state, and municipal sites where the public arrives for services spread across buildings, and Section 508 conformance is a procurement requirement.
Universities and Colleges
Campuses with high visitor turnover and a building inventory that changes every term.
Large Institutional Facilities
Research parks, civic centers, and corporate campuses where signage cannot keep pace with how often the interior layout changes.
Ownership and data rights
Hydra Wayfinder is Hydra-owned commercial software, developed and maintained at Hydra private expense rather than with government funding. Customers acquire the right to access and use the platform during the period of performance. No rights in the underlying software transfer, and Hydra retains the right to offer the platform to other customers.
Customer utilization data belongs to the customer. The platform belongs to Hydra.
Discuss a deployment
Tell us about the campus you have in mind and we will walk through scope, floor plan requirements, accessibility conformance, and schedule.