A patient engagement platform, in a hospital, is the software that guides a patient during a hospital stay and after going home. It runs the screen at the patient's bedside, and it sends the text messages that help the patient recover after discharge. Discharge is the moment the patient leaves hospital. This kind of platform is sold mainly to hospitals in the United States, and much of it is built in Bengaluru.
The bedside screen is usually a tablet or the television in the room, connected to the hospital's systems. On it, the patient sees the names of the care team, the day's schedule and short videos about the illness. The patient can order a meal, call a nurse or rate the stay. Each screen knows which patient is in which bed, because it reads this from the hospital EHR.
The harder work starts at discharge. A patient goes home with new medicines, perhaps a wound to look after, and a follow-up visit to book. Many patients forget some of this. Some become ill again and return to hospital within a few weeks. Doctors call this a readmission. In the United States, Medicare, the government health plan for people over 65, reduces its payments to hospitals that have too many readmissions. So hospitals want to follow up every patient after discharge.
Imagine a 70-year-old man in Georgia who goes home after treatment for heart failure. Heart failure means the heart pumps too weakly, so fluid builds up in the body. The platform sends him a text every morning for 30 days. On day 3, it asks for his weight. He replies that it has gone up by 3 pounds, about 1.4 kg, since the day before. A fast rise in weight can mean that fluid is building up again. So the platform alerts a nurse. The nurse calls him the same day, and his doctor changes the dose of his medicine. Without the alert, he might have been back in the emergency room a week later.
The texts are sent through a business messaging service. When a patient needs help over many months, the platform passes the patient to the hospital's care management team, nurses who follow patients with complex illnesses. AI agents that phone patients about an overdue check-up do a related job, described in patient outreach automation.
How is it different from scheduling and intake software? Scheduling software handles the visit before it happens. A patient engagement platform handles the hospital stay and the weeks after it.