A guide to adding patient engagement capabilities to your EHR platform

The evolution of the EHR: From static record to proactive care platform

The role of the Electronic Health Record (EHR) is undergoing a fundamental transformation. It's moving beyond a passive system for data collection into a proactive engine for patient engagement. While traditionally serving as a digital filing cabinet, leading EHR platforms are now leveraging patient data to power personalised outreach and guide individuals throughout their healthcare journey.

For EHR product builders, this means shifting the roadmap focus from simply capturing information to building features that actively use this data to improve patient outcomes and foster continuous engagement.

What is patient engagement?

Patient engagement is the strategy of using the rich, first-party data within the EHR to proactively and automatically communicate with individuals about their care. This approach uses personalised outreach to guide patients, improve adherence, and encourage valuable health actions. It transforms the patient experience from a series of disconnected appointments into a continuous, supportive journey.

Patient engagement in action

Here are just a few examples of how patient engagement can be used to increase the value of EHR platforms:

Appointment reminders & confirmations

Healthcare practices face significant revenue loss and administrative burdens from patient no-shows and manual appointment management. Most standard EHRs offer only basic, one-way notifications that fail to engage patients effectively. To solve this, EHRs can implement automated, interactive communication journeys that allow patients to confirm or request to reschedule appointments through two-way messaging, reducing costly no-shows and manual staff follow-up.

Example: Automated pre-appointment reminders:

• Two days prior to a scheduled appointment, identify all end users for whom the appointment status is not 'Confirmed'.
• Send these specific end users an interactive SMS asking them to reply 'YES' to confirm or 'CHANGE' to request a reschedule.
• If the response is 'YES', update the appointment record in your platform to "Confirmed".
• If the response is 'CHANGE', automatically create a task for your user's front-desk team and send a follow-up SMS to the end user stating that a team member will be in touch to reschedule.

Automated adherence journeys

Poor patient adherence to post-treatment plans leads to diminished health outcomes and increased, costly readmissions for healthcare providers. Manual follow-up from clinical staff is often inefficient and difficult to scale across a large patient population. Electronic Health Record platforms can solve this by enabling the deployment of automated communication journeys that guide patients, improve adherence, and allow staff to focus on high-risk cases.

Example: Surgical recovery and medication adherence 

• When a patient is discharged after a major orthopaedic surgery, start a recovery support flow 
• Identify patients prescribed a specific opioid pain medication and send a daily SMS for the first seven days reminding them to take their medication and asking them to rate their pain on a scale of 1-10 
• If a patient reports a pain level of 8 or higher for two consecutive days, trigger an alert to the surgical liaison nurse 
• After day seven, if the patient's reported pain levels are consistently below 4, automatically switch to an email-based check-in every three days, asking about mobility and any signs of infection

Preventative care reminders

Typically, EHR platforms have offered limited, passive methods for reminding patients about necessary screenings and check-ups. By leveraging patient health data, these platforms can now enable providers to deploy automated, personalised outreach campaigns that proactively encourage patients to schedule the preventative care they need.

Example: Annual mammogram reminder 

• When a patient's record indicates they are female, over 40 years of age, and their last mammogram was more than 11 months ago, automatically send an email. The email will remind them they are due for their annual screening, explain the importance of regular mammograms, and provide a direct link to your user's online booking portal 
• If the patient does not book an appointment within two weeks, send a follow-up SMS

Automated feedback & review collection

Healthcare practices struggle to consistently gather patient feedback, which makes it difficult to manage their online reputation and address service issues effectively. Most platforms in this space offer limited, disconnected tools for surveys and reviews, lacking an integrated strategy. Modern healthcare platforms can solve this by automating post-visit feedback requests and intelligently routing patients based on their sentiment, simultaneously boosting public ratings and enabling private service recovery.

Example: NPS-based review routing

• A patient completes their appointment, and their status is updated in the EHR platform
• Within an hour, they receive an SMS: "Hi [Patient First Name], thank you for visiting [Clinic Name] today. To help us improve, please reply with a number from 0 (Not Likely) to 10 (Very Likely) to the question: How likely are you to recommend our practice to a friend or colleague?"
• The patient replies with "9".
• Because the score is 9 or higher, they are identified as a "Promoter" and automatically receive a follow-up SMS: "That's wonderful to hear! We would be so grateful if you could share your positive experience on Google to help other patients find us. You can leave a review here: [Link to Google Reviews]."
• If the patient had replied with a score of 0-6, they would be identified as a "Detractor" and would have received a different message: "We are sorry to hear that your experience did not meet your expectations. Your feedback is very important. Please let us know more about what happened via our private feedback form so we can address your concerns directly: [Link to Internal Feedback Form]."

What outcomes can patient engagement drive?

By moving from a passive record-keeper to a proactive engagement engine, EHR platforms can drive real value for healthcare practices:

Increase appointment revenue: By using automated, multi-channel appointment reminders and allowing patients to easily confirm or reschedule via two-way messaging, practices can significantly decrease their no-show rate, boosting appointment revenue and optimising clinician schedules.

Improve patient outcomes: Proactive journeys can be used to send medication reminders, deliver educational content, and check in on patients post-visit. This continuous support helps improve adherence to treatment plans, leading to better health outcomes and success in value-based care models.

Increase administrative efficiency: Automating routine communications—from appointment confirmations to follow-up instructions—frees up front-desk and clinical staff from countless hours of manual phone calls, allowing them to focus on higher-value, in-person patient care.

Improve CSAT: Smoother, proactive engagement journeys lead to happier patients, directly translating into higher CSAT scores. This in turn can lead to more patient intake via word of mouth and online reviews from satisfied patients.

How to add patient engagement capabilities to your EHR platform

So, you're convinced of the value. How do you actually embed patient engagement capabilities in your EHR platform? Several approaches exist, each with implications for development resources, time-to-market, and ongoing maintenance:

Custom development: This offers maximum customisation. However, it requires significant research and development, dedicated expertise, substantial upfront investment, and continuous ongoing maintenance to adapt to new needs. Time-to-market can be very long.

White-labeling a specialised solution: For many EHR providers, the most efficient, scalable, and feature-rich path is through white-labeling. This approach allows you to embed patient engagement capabilities quickly and seamlessly.

White-labeling software lets you integrate pre-built features or entire modules from a third-party provider directly into your own EHR platform. These features are presented seamlessly to your users under your brand and user interface. This dramatically accelerates your product roadmap by allowing you to instantly offer sophisticated, new capabilities without dedicating internal resources to build and maintain them from scratch.

Benefits of white label

Save time. Integrate powerful new functionality into your platform in a fraction of the time it would take for an internal build, dramatically accelerating your product roadmap and speed to market.

Focus your resources. A white label solution lets your development team concentrate on enhancing your core EHR features and unique value, rather than diverting resources to build adjacent capabilities.

Fully built solution. Immediately leverage a mature and scalable engine built and refined over years, offering proven capabilities to your users from day one.

Eliminate tech debt. The white label provider manages the technical upkeep, keeping your team agile.

Evaluating white label solutions for patient engagement

When choosing a platform to white label patient engagement features, consider these key factors:

Functionality depth & use case coverage. Does the solution provide the specific depth and flexibility needed for your priority use cases, or are there critical limitations you need to plan workarounds for? Will this functionality meet your users' core needs without being overly complex or insufficient?

Native user experience & brand alignment. How much control will you have over the UI/UX to ensure this feels truly native to your platform and matches your brand seamlessly? Will users perceive this as a natural extension of your EHR offering, or a disjointed add-on?

Integration scope & resource investment. Realistically, what is the estimated engineering effort and timeline required from your team for the initial integration? What level of ongoing effort should our team expect for managing the integration post-launch, and how responsive and effective is the vendor's technical support if issues arise that impact our customers directly? 

Partner platform reliability & scalability. What assurances (SLAs, historical uptime) do you have regarding the reliability and scalability of the underlying platform, given its direct impact on your product? Can their infrastructure demonstrably handle your current and projected user load?

Data security & compliance responsibility. How does the solution ensure the security and privacy of our users' data, especially concerning regulations like GDPR? What are the specific responsibilities for managing security and compliance within the integrated system?

Introducing Aperture by Pendula: A white label patient engagement platform

Aperture by Pendula is a white label solution that powers some of the world's leading B2B SaaS platforms. We combine a visual workflow builder with native communication channels and powerful data integrations, allowing you to embed a complete patient engagement engine into your EHR in just weeks.

Key capabilities:

Visual workflow & journey design: At the heart of Aperture is a powerful visual builder. It enables users to design sophisticated communication journeys with features like smart decisioning and flexible automation. You can choose to embed the full builder for maximum user flexibility, or offer pre-defined workflows for standardised use cases.

Data integration & triggers: Layer powerful data connectivity onto your workflows. Aperture's integration capabilities allow you to trigger journeys from user behaviour in your platform or data changes in other systems. This also enables rich audience segmentation based on real-time, unified data.

Omnichannel communication channels: Complete the journey with reliable communication. Aperture features native, scalable channels—including Email, SMS, RCS, and WhatsApp—that can be orchestrated by your workflows to deliver the right message on the right channel at the right time.

Take the Next Step with Aperture by Pendula 

Interested in white-labelling Aperture by Pendula to quickly and easily embed patient engagement capabilities in your EHR platform?