More Than Just Television: How IPTV Enhances Patient Engagement at Healthcare Facilities

When you think of TVs in hospital patient rooms and waiting areas, what comes to mind? It’s easy to picture daytime talk shows, sports coverage, news, and other mindless television programming running in the background. Yet with IPTV (internet-protocol television), healthcare TV solutions have become something more: a powerful, integrative tool for patient engagement and communication.

IPTV as a Centralized Patient Engagement Platform

TV solutions equipped with IPTV are not the same as the analog televisions of yesteryear. IPTV technology delivers TV content via an IP multicast stream to TVs, projectors, video walls, and STBs. While centralizing each TV’s capabilities into an all-in-one solution, IPTV technology empowers your healthcare facility to support your patients in a variety of beneficial ways beyond the scope of traditional television, including:

Enhanced Entertainment Offerings

Gone are the days of flipping through a limited number of TV channels from a hospital’s local cable provider. Instead, IPTV expands your patients’ entertainment options dramatically. By providing TVs with IPTV capabilities, you enable your patients to enjoy satellite TV, music, movies on demand, educational content on demand, and more in their rooms.

IPTV’s entertainment offerings give your patients the control and access they’ve grown accustomed to in their everyday life. Considering the challenging situation that brought each patient to the hospital in the first place, offering entertainment that reminds them of home will help reduce their stress and improve their hospital experience.

Personalized Educational Content

IPTV’s capabilities equip your facility to provide educational video content on demand to patients based on their specific health needs. While patients are in their rooms, they can access helpful educational content about their condition, self-care practices, and other resources that support their care. Not only does this give patients peace of mind; the education provided can also ultimately reduce overall hospital readmission rates as patients leave equipped to stay healthy after their treatment ends.

Total Alert System

The IPTV system, Total Alert System (TAS), is an advanced, supplemental hospital alert solution designed to deliver instant mass communication at the push of a button. Integrated within a hospital’s IPTV infrastructure, TAS enables facilities to broadcast passive notifications such as color-coded emergency alerts and hospital-wide takeover across every display, whether the TVs are on or powered off. Once an emergency or event has concluded, the IPTV system automatically restores each screen to its previous state, ensuring seamless continuity of patient and staff viewing experiences.

At the same time, providers and nurses can send personalized messages to patients through IPTV in their rooms. And these alerts can be managed and deployed from one centralized interface within the facility, reducing the need for hospital staff to physically travel from room to room to communicate with their patients.

Accessible Facility Information

Large healthcare facilities are often hard to navigate for patients and their families. But with IPTV technology, patients and visitors can access helpful facility information on demand in their rooms.

When paired with commercial TVs, IPTV also works well for navigational purposes outside patient rooms, too. IPTV technology can act as digital signage and way finding help on TVs set up in hallways and high-traffic areas within the facility. And when signage needs to be modified facility-wide, it can be easily done from one remote location.

Scalable TV Solutions for Modern Hospitals

With enhanced patient engagement and communication through IPTV, your hospital can deliver a better patient experience, and in turn, receive better patient satisfaction scores. If you’re ready to incorporate IPTV into your healthcare facility, we can help at RTG. From hospital-grade TVs and digital head ends to IPTV and more, we provide scalable TV solutions for today’s ever-changing healthcare landscape. Request a quote today to get started.