Designing Healthcare IT Systems to Improve Patient Engagement and Empower Individuals to Take an Active Role in Their Care

Patient Engagement is an important key to success. It doesn’t matter how well-designed and helpful healthcare IT systems are if no one is engaging with them. There are a couple of areas that we need to consider when trying to improve engagement. First, are the patients aware of the systems? Sometimes, raising awareness of the services you offer can be enough to increase engagement. Second, are your systems working in a way that encourages engagement? While your systems may be working perfectly for the initial tasks they were designed for, if they’re not also designed to be user-friendly for your patients, engagement will be poor. Lastly, we use EHR as a main go-to in healthcare – is this enough, or do we need outside technology? Sometimes, you just need more systems to expand upon your current ones to truly achieve the results you want.

To get a better look into this, we reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today community to ask — how can healthcare IT systems be designed to improve patient engagement and empower individuals to take an active role in their care? Is the EHR enough, or do you need outside technology? The following are their answers.

Eric Makovsky, SVP Customer Engagement at Tendo
Healthcare IT systems must go beyond traditional EHR functionalities to truly improve patient engagement and empower individuals in their care journey. While EHRs serve as a foundational source of patient data, they are often passive systems that rely on patients or providers to initiate action. To drive meaningful engagement, healthcare organizations need advanced outreach solutions powered by AI and automation. AI-driven technology can proactively identify patients in need of care, whether for routine screenings, preventative care, or specialized treatments, and reach out with specific, actionable next steps. This goes beyond simple scheduling; automated reminders and intelligent patient engagement tools make it seamless for individuals to book appointments, complete screenings, and stay on top of their health.

Chuck Hayes, VP, Product Management at TeleVox
Healthcare IT systems need more than just EHRs to improve patient engagement. Adding tools like communication platforms, mobile apps, text chat, AI virtual assistants, and personalized education helps patients take an active role in their care. EHRs alone aren’t enough; connecting with other apps and technologies is key to a full, patient-centered experience. Patient relationship management platforms can send personalized reminders, alerts, and education to keep patients involved in their health journey.

Jaimes Blunt, EVP of Infrastructure at emtelligent
Data and transparency are essential for empowering patients to actively participate in their care. However, much of the clinical information in EHRs is unstructured, making it difficult and costly for healthcare providers to use in patient engagement. Fortunately, the emergence of medical AI is enabling better extraction, interpretation, and summarization of unstructured data, delivering actionable insights to both healthcare organizations and patients.

These insights can guide care plans and motivate patients to take charge of their health. For example, extracting medication data for prescription refills can improve patient adherence, while summarizing wearable data can inspire patients to engage in activities that enhance their health outcomes. Additionally, by analyzing social determinants of health, medical AI can provide patients with valuable insights into how factors like their environment or social conditions impact their health, empowering them to make informed decisions about their well-being.

Mclain Causey, Vice President, Product at IKS Health
The power of data analysis is such that actionable insights can emerge from surprising sources when coupled together and analyzed against outcomes. More is being asked of patients these days in their healthcare journeys and it is easy to become confused and disengaged. The question is, how do we keep patients engaged and adherent?

In order to get consumers to change behaviors, sophisticated behavioral profiling is used to understand consumers and build empathy at scale with each individual among the masses of users. This is how consumers sometimes receive advertisements that are so precisely targeted that they wonder if their phone is being surveilled. But there is a more noble cause than consumerism that behavioral profiling and engagement can serve: getting patients more invested and engaged in their healthcare journeys.

In order to unlock the power of behavioral profiling for patient engagement, it’s essential to create behavioral models that study historical patient data and individually scores a patient’s awareness of obligations, ability to meet them, and willingness to do so, while surfacing underlying behavioral risk factors and associated mitigation strategies. For example, it might be determined that transportation challenges are an underlying risk factor, with a recommendation to offer non-emergent medical transport or ride sharing to get the patient to the appointment. Further, the channel, cadence, and tone of reminders are personalized to the patient’s behavioral profile to drive adherence.

Driving patient engagement with specific behavioral profiling is more critical now than ever as patients wrestle with the complexities and barriers of healthcare.

Chandra Osborn, Chief Experience Officer at AdhereHealth
While EHRs are essential for storing and managing clinical data, they are not enough to drive meaningful patient engagement. True engagement requires technology that extends beyond data collection to proactively support and influence patient behavior.

To empower individuals in their care, healthcare IT systems must integrate behavioral science, data analytics, and multi-channel communication. Personalized outreach—through text, calls, and digital tools—helps address social determinants of health, identify barriers to adherence, and provide tailored support.

The future of healthcare engagement is not just about storing data but using it intelligently to drive action, close care gaps, and improve patient experiences in ways that resonate with how people think and behave.

Victor de Lédinghen, Chief Medical Officer at Echosens
Electronic health records (EHRs) play a crucial role in centralizing patient information, but they aren’t enough on their own to drive meaningful patient engagement. Outside technology (e.g., cloud-based diagnostic platforms and non-invasive, point-of-care assessments) is needed to empower patients with immediate insights on their health and drive action.

For example, liver disease is often asymptomatic until it reaches an advanced stage, making early detection critical. Digital health tools that integrate real-time liver health assessments into care workflows allow providers to deliver instant, actionable results, helping patients better understand their risks, as well as engage in lifestyle changes and follow-up care. Advancements in non-invasive diagnostics allow a wider range of healthcare professionals, not just specialists, to perform screenings, expanding access to liver health assessments in primary care, pharmacy-based clinics, and community health settings. By making liver health assessments more automated, digital tools ensure that more patients receive timely evaluations, rather than waiting for specialist referrals.

Andrew Speight, CMO at RXNT
Health records—and the patient data contained within them—are at the core of patient engagement, but they are just one piece of a complex puzzle. An EHR must be combined with other technology to enable patient experiences that feel personal, and are intuitive and convenient enough to make patients feel both involved in the care journey and motivated to actively engage with their care team.

For patients to take and maintain an active role in their care, a true telehealth experience is required. It’s simply not enough to give patients access to telemedicine tools alone; better patient engagement is about the complete experience. A proper patient engagement portal should have enough embedded functionality and integrated technology that it takes some of the burden (information gathering, form collecting, appointment rescheduling, etc.) off of providers and staff while helping patients feel empowered to manage their data, appointments, test results, medical bills, and more. Combine that with patient-provider messaging, and there’s a genuine opportunity to establish a relationship digitally and connect with patients better than with in-person appointments alone.

To really build lasting patient engagement, it’s essential to understand individual patient needs and tendencies. Some patients are happy to manage data and care via their smartphones, which means it’s critical to get the patient portal mobile app right. Others will prefer more traditional methods, like a quick phone call or a simple message via a patient portal website. Technology enables you to understand and provide tailored options for patients to connect with you the way they prefer. When a healthcare IT system has taken this into account, it can drastically improve engagement and ultimately help ensure you’re delivering the best care possible.

Kelly Conklin, Chief Customer Officer and Chief Clinical Officer at PerfectServe
Here’s the truth: The EHR alone isn’t going to cut it. If we really want to improve patient experience, we need to move beyond one-size-fits-all systems and start designing technology that meets people where they are, and that includes patients and their families. Expecting someone to remember another login or navigate a clunky portal just to stay informed about their health? That’s not empowerment—that’s a barrier.

There’s a quote I love: ‘Nothing about me without me.’ Patients want to be part of the conversation, especially when it involves their care. That should be non-negotiable. And yet, I’ve seen far too many moments in healthcare where the patient and their family are left out, even during critical decisions. As a nurse, I always believed in inclusion—even during something like a code situation—because people deserve to understand what’s happening and know they’re not in it alone.

Healthcare IT has the power to fix a lot of these disconnects. Better scheduling, reduced wait times, faster access to clinicians—these aren’t just workflow wins, they’re patient experience wins. But here’s the catch: Too many organizations are still stuck in the mindset of ‘what we have is good enough.’ Or they’re so tangled up in overlapping tech that adding something new feels like just another headache.

The tech is there. What’s missing is often the willingness and the support to bring about change. That’s where leadership matters. We have to make space for new solutions, smooth the path with governance and change management, and never forget that the goal is to make things better for both patients and the people caring for them.

Ashley Franks, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at TigerConnect
The systems to improve patient-care team communication and boost engagement are at our disposal, but some healthcare organizations lag in adopting them. The challenge isn’t designing the technology itself, it’s moving beyond the perception of digital communication tools as operational add-ons and recognizing them as essential to enhancing the patient experience and care team workflows.

EHRs are foundational for patient care, but are not always equipped to serve as the sole backbone for clinical communication. Rather, supplemental technology that supports and connects the care continuum, such as in-room experiences, comprehensive care management solutions, telehealth, and remote monitoring, is a necessity for today’s health providers striving to deliver top-quality care. With improved internal communications and workflows, care teams encourage patients to take a more active role in their health.

Carrie Kozlowski, Co-Founder and COO at Upfront by Health Catalyst
Personalization is paramount to patient experience. Patients are consumers – they expect us to anticipate their needs, understand their lifestyles, and prioritize the sites of care they prefer to access. Yet, knowledge of their existing barriers, gaps in care, and preferred lines of communication often hinges on the ability to collect data and translate it into actionable insights. This is often where health enterprises are lacking. Implementing thoughtful patient experience initiatives for population health data collection or refocusing on operationalizing previously collected data from government-mandated SDOH surveys is a good place to start.

There is also a real opportunity to build patient trust by ensuring that any new data leads to meaningful solutions, i.e., embedding relevant services for financial, transportation, childcare, or health literacy needs into patient outreach. With these actions, patients are empowered to complete care, and enterprises can expect to improve value-based care performance, strengthen quality scores, and deliver a more equitable experience for every patient.

Wendi Tillung, Senior Director, Transformation & Innovation Services at Nordic Global
Patients need a meaningful reason to use technology. Creating opportunities for patients is the key to the adoption of effective and efficient technologies. If patients want to be able to message their care team, schedule appointments, request medication renewals, and view visit and testing results, you need to create space for access that best fits their needs. Understanding patient populations is also important as utilization differs so customizing the experience should be a priority.

Matt Noble, SVP, Head of Patient Cloud at Medidata Solutions
To improve patient engagement, healthcare providers must go beyond EHRs and incorporate technology that supports the entire patient journey – from pre-visit preparation to long-term follow-up. This means designing unified, intuitive platforms that serve as a single, accessible hub for patients to track their health, reducing the friction of juggling multiple logins or siloed portals. Such systems are especially valuable in clinical trials, where sustained engagement before, during, and after is key to trial success and patient satisfaction. Integrating AI-powered features like e-consent and real-time health data collection not only streamlines the process but also makes it more responsive to patient needs.

Ultimately, healthcare IT leaders must prioritize the patient perspective in system development, actively engaging with real-world patients to understand and address their concerns and needs. This patient-centric approach ensures that the technology not only supports clinical objectives but also enhances the overall patient experience.

So many great answers here! Huge thank you to everyone who took the time out of their day to submit a quote to us! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.

How do you think healthcare systems can be designed to improve patient engagement and empower individuals to take an active role in their care? Do you think the EHR is enough, or do you need outside technology? Let us know over on social media, we’d love to hear from all of you!