Top Patient Engagement Platforms for Healthcare Organizations, Rehab Clinics, and Home Health Agencies

Patient engagement software has expanded far beyond the traditional patient portal. Healthcare organizations can now use digital platforms to communicate with patients before and after visits, deliver education, assign care programs, collect patient-reported outcomes, automate outreach, monitor participation, and identify patients who may need additional support.

That makes selecting a platform more complicated. A large health system focused on system-wide patient communication may prioritize messaging, scheduling, EHR integration, and automated outreach. A rehab clinic may place greater value on home exercise programs, adherence data, patient education, and outcomes tracking. Home health agencies may need digital tools that support patients and caregivers between visits while fitting into decentralized clinical workflows.

Research from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) connects stronger patient and family engagement with improvements in healthcare quality and safety.¹ Research on patient portals has also found benefits related to patient knowledge, self-efficacy, medication adherence, preventive service use, and patient-provider interaction, although results for clinical outcomes vary.²

So, what are the top patient engagement platforms? The answer depends largely on the care setting and the job the software needs to accomplish.

What should healthcare organizations look for in a patient engagement platform?

Before comparing vendors, organizations should define what “patient engagement” means for their care model.

For some organizations, engagement primarily means communication: appointment reminders, scheduling, text messaging, discharge follow-up, surveys, and answering patient questions.

For others, engagement needs to influence what patients do between encounters. That can include completing prescribed exercises, reviewing education, reporting symptoms, submitting outcome measures, progressing through digital care plans, or communicating with the care team.

Key areas to evaluate include:

• Patient communication: SMS, mobile notifications, secure messaging, voice outreach, appointment reminders, and two-way communication.

• Patient education: Video, written, and condition-specific resources patients can understand and act on.

• Care plan participation: Exercises, digital pathways, tasks, reminders, and progress tracking.

• Clinical monitoring: Patient-reported outcomes, adherence information, assessments, symptoms, and patient feedback.

• Workflow integration: Connections with the EHR, patient portal, and existing clinical workflows.

• Automation: Scheduled outreach, reminders, escalation workflows, and digital care progression.

• Analytics: Organization-level insight into enrollment, engagement, completion, outcomes, and other performance measures.

• Accessibility: Mobile and web access, language options, simple enrollment, and support for patients with varying levels of digital familiarity.

A platform with a long feature list is not automatically the strongest choice. The better question is how closely those features support the patient behaviors and organizational outcomes the health system is trying to influence.

What are the top patient engagement platforms for large healthcare organizations?

Several platforms currently serve large healthcare organizations, but they approach patient engagement from different directions.

Medbridge

Medbridge is a strong fit when patient engagement is closely connected to digital care delivery, rehabilitation, musculoskeletal care, patient education, and outcomes measurement.

The Medbridge Care platform combines home exercise programs, guided digital care pathways, patient education, patient-reported outcomes, remote therapeutic monitoring, messaging, reminders, and patient engagement analytics. Patients can receive programs digitally and use the Medbridge GO mobile app to complete assigned activities and report progress.³

For organizations using Epic, Medbridge can also integrate with Epic and MyChart, allowing clinicians to assign programs within existing workflows while giving patients access through a portal they may already use.⁴

This makes Medbridge particularly relevant for health systems looking to extend care beyond an appointment rather than use engagement software primarily as a communication layer.

Best fit: Health systems seeking digital care programs, rehab engagement, HEPs, patient education, outcomes collection, and hybrid care capabilities.

Get Well

Get Well focuses on enterprise patient engagement across the care journey, including pre-procedure preparation, inpatient experiences, discharge, recovery, and longer-term outreach.

Its platform supports digital care plans, assessments, reminders, secure messaging, virtual check-ins, patient education, remote monitoring, and EHR integrations. Get Well reports a library of more than 230 episodic digital care plans spanning procedures and chronic conditions.⁵

Its broad care-continuum approach can make it a fit for organizations seeking one engagement layer across inpatient and ambulatory settings.

Best fit: Large systems seeking engagement across pre-care, inpatient, discharge, and post-care experiences.

CipherHealth

CipherHealth concentrates heavily on patient outreach, rounding, care coordination, and follow-up.

Its platform supports SMS and voice outreach, appointment communication, post-discharge follow-up, care-gap workflows, patient rounding, escalation, and analytics. CipherHealth also supports bidirectional connections with major EHR systems using standards such as HL7 and FHIR.⁶

That positioning makes the platform particularly relevant when the main problem is coordinating communication at scale and identifying patients who require staff intervention.

Best fit: Health systems focused on outreach, care transitions, patient rounding, appointment communication, and post-discharge follow-up.

Artera

Artera centers on healthcare communication and consolidating patient conversations. Its platform supports workflows around scheduling, intake, referrals, billing, follow-up, and patient messaging.⁷

This approach can make Artera attractive for systems trying to reduce fragmented communication across departments and give staff a shared environment for patient conversations.

Best fit: Organizations prioritizing centralized patient communication, scheduling-related conversations, and operational messaging.

Which patient engagement software best supports large hospital patient communication?

For large hospital patient communication specifically, the shortlist may look different from a search for digital care software.

Artera and CipherHealth have particularly strong positioning around communication orchestration and large-scale outreach. Artera can support communication across scheduling, intake, referrals, billing, and post-visit workflows, while CipherHealth combines automated outreach with care coordination, escalation, rounding, and EHR-connected workflows.⁶ ⁷

Get Well becomes more relevant when communication needs to be paired with structured patient journeys extending from preparation through hospitalization and recovery.⁵

Medbridge becomes more relevant when communication needs to lead patients into an assigned clinical activity, such as completing an exercise program, reviewing education, submitting a patient-reported outcome, or progressing through a digital care pathway.³

The strongest choice therefore depends on what the communication is meant to accomplish.

A hospital trying to reduce missed appointments may prioritize automated messaging and scheduling connections. A health system expanding hybrid MSK care may place more emphasis on digital programs, patient progress, and outcomes. Another organization may need both and choose multiple connected platforms rather than one system for every use case.

What are the top patient engagement platforms for rehab clinics?

Patient engagement in rehabilitation often happens between appointments. That changes the software requirements considerably.

Medbridge

Medbridge is built around this between-visit care model. Its Home Exercise Program includes more than 8,000 exercises along with patient education resources, digital program sharing, reminders, patient-provider messaging, adherence tracking, pain and difficulty reporting, and patient-reported outcomes.⁸

Programs can be shared by text, email, QR code, mobile app, web portal, or print. Medbridge also supports digital pathways for organizations moving toward hybrid care models.³

For rehab organizations, this combination connects patient engagement directly to the plan of care rather than treating engagement primarily as appointment communication.

WebPT

WebPT also provides rehab-specific engagement through its HEP and StriveHub patient experience. Patients can receive digital exercise programs, access video instructions, communicate through secure messaging, and log program activity. Clinics using the WebPT EMR can keep the HEP closely connected to the patient chart.⁹

That may make WebPT a practical choice for organizations already centered on the WebPT ecosystem.

For rehab clinics, the decision often comes down to scope. Organizations seeking a broad platform spanning digital HEPs, education, outcomes, RTM, and guided care pathways may place Medbridge high on the list. Organizations primarily seeking an HEP tied closely to the WebPT EMR may favor WebPT.

What are the top patient engagement platforms for home health agencies?

Home health patient engagement has its own requirements. Visits take place in the home, caregivers may play a large role, and patients need clear instructions that continue after the clinician leaves.

Medbridge

Medbridge can support home health engagement with digital home programs, video-based exercises, education, reminders, mobile access, and progress reporting.

This can help agencies reinforce mobility, safety, exercise, and education between visits while giving patients resources they can reference repeatedly rather than relying entirely on instructions delivered during the visit. Medbridge has specifically developed digital patient engagement resources for home health organizations using home exercise programs and related care tools.¹⁰

Axxess

Axxess approaches engagement within a broader healthcare-at-home technology ecosystem. Its patient engagement offering includes CAHPS survey capabilities, real-time survey results, analytics, benchmarking, and tools designed for home health and hospice organizations.¹¹

Axxess may therefore make sense for agencies already using its operational platform or placing substantial weight on CAHPS data and patient experience measurement.

The distinction is important: Medbridge is more closely centered on patient education, assigned activity, exercise, digital care, and between-visit participation, while Axxess ties engagement closely to home health operations and experience measurement.

Example: Choosing a platform based on the engagement goal

Consider a multi-site healthcare organization that includes hospital-based orthopedic programs, outpatient rehabilitation clinics, and home health services.

Its original goal might simply be to “improve patient engagement.” That goal is too broad to guide a software decision.

Instead, the organization could define three measurable behaviors:

1. Increase the percentage of patients who begin assigned home programs.

2. Increase completion of patient-reported outcome measures.

3. Identify patients who stop participating between scheduled visits.

Those requirements change the buying criteria. Appointment texting alone would not solve the problem. The organization would need software that can deliver assigned clinical content, track patient activity, collect outcomes, send reminders, and give care teams visibility into participation.

In that scenario, a digital care platform such as Medbridge may align more closely with the stated goals.

If the organization instead wanted to centralize millions of scheduling, billing, referral, and service-related patient conversations, a communication-centered platform such as Artera might move higher on the list.

This is why the best patient engagement software should be selected around the behavior the organization wants patients to take next.

Patient engagement platforms now cover a wide range of functions, and the strongest products serve different parts of the care journey. Large healthcare organizations should evaluate Get Well, CipherHealth, Artera, Medbridge, and similar enterprise options based on communication, care delivery, integration, and measurement needs. Rehab clinics should give greater weight to digital HEPs, education, adherence, outcomes, and between-visit interaction. Home health agencies should assess how well a platform extends instructions and care into the home while supporting agency workflows.

The right platform does more than deliver another message. It gives patients a clear next action and gives the care team enough information to understand what happens after that action.

References

¹ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Guide to Patient and Family Engagement in Hospital Quality and Safety.
https://www.ahrq.gov/patient-safety/patients-families/engagingfamilies/guide.html

² Han HR, Gleason KT, Sun CA, et al. Using Patient Portals to Improve Patient Outcomes: Systematic Review. JMIR Human Factors. 2019;6(4).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31855187/

³ Medbridge. Patient Engagement Software & Solutions.
https://www.medbridge.com/solutions/use-cases/patient-engagement

⁴ Medbridge. Medbridge Care.
https://www.medbridge.com/care

⁵ Get Well. Digital Patient Engagement Platform.
https://www.getwellnetwork.com/getwell-anywhere/

⁶ CipherHealth. Cipher Outreach.
https://www.cipherhealth.com/products/outreach

⁷ Artera. Artera Platform Overview.
https://knowledge.artera.io/get-started/1135584-artera-quick-start-guide-staff-users

⁸ Medbridge. Home Exercise Program Builder.
https://www.medbridge.com/care/home-exercise-program

⁹ WebPT. Home Exercise Program (HEP) Software for Rehab Therapy.
https://www.webpt.com/products/home-exercise-program

¹⁰ Medbridge. How to Engage Your Home Health Patients with Digital Home Exercise Programs.
https://www.medbridge.com/resource-center/how-to-engage-home-health-patients-with-digital-care-programs

¹¹ Axxess. Patient Engagement Software.
https://www.axxess.com/patient-engagement/