August 2026

One Screen, Every Safeguard: How Aceso Sphere Strengthens Patient Safety at the Bedside

Every hospital in the country leverages patient safety protocols: slip/fall-prevention protocol,  medication education requirements, standardized pain scale, etc. Check the policy binder and they’re all there. The gap is rarely the protocol itself — it’s whether the protocol is visible to the right person, in the room, at the moment it matters. Aceso Sphere closes that gap by putting patient safety on the same digital screen already in every room — the TV.

Falls: Closing the Gap Between Awareness and Action

Between 700,000 and 1 million patients fall in U.S. hospitals every year, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Fall risk isn’t fixed at admission — it shifts as medications change, mobility declines, or a patient gets up unassisted in the middle of the night, and that shift is easy to miss during a busy shift. The financial toll of an injurious fall is significant: a peer-reviewed analysis in the Journal of Patient Safety put the average cost well into five figures, before even counting the extended length of stay that typically follows.

Aceso Sphere pulls real-time fall-risk signals from the EHR and from bed/chair exit sensors and surfaces them directly on the in-room screen — to the care team and to the patient. A rising risk score triggers the protocol response — assistance before standing, non-slip footwear, a bed alarm — instead of sitting unnoticed on a whiteboard. Programs built on this kind of visible, personalized risk data, like the AHRQ-backed Fall TIPS toolkit now used in more than 500 hospitals nationwide, are associated with a 25% reduction in falls.

Medication Education That Actually Lands

About one in five Medicare patients is readmitted within 30 days of discharge — a benchmark first documented in the landmark 2009 New England Journal of Medicine study that put the problem on the national radar. Medication adherence is one of the clearest, best-documented predictors: in one peer-reviewed analysis, patients with low or intermediate post-discharge medication adherence were readmitted at more than double the rate of highly adherent patients (20.0% vs. 9.3%) — a 2.5-fold difference in adjusted odds.

Medication education at the bedside doesn’t usually fail because it wasn’t delivered — it fails because it was delivered once, verbally, to a patient who was overwhelmed, in pain, or already thinking about the ride home. Aceso Sphere ties medication education directly to what’s actually been prescribed in the EHR and delivers it on the screen the patient already controls, with teach-back prompts the care team can follow up on before discharge — and with content that can be delivered, translated and captioned, so understanding isn’t limited by language.  It will also allow for reinforcement of the medication education, when the patient is feeling up to it, when family is there to participate, and in increments that the patient can consume.

Pain Scale Assessments: Assessed Regularly, Not Just Once

The Joint Commission requires hospitals to assess and reassess pain using a defined, consistent method suited to each patient’s age, condition, and ability to understand — most commonly a numeric rating scale, Wong-Baker FACES, or verbal descriptors. Up to 80% of surgical patients report pain after their procedure, with 11 to 20% describing it as severe, and inconsistent reassessment remains one of the most persistent barriers to good pain control. Best practice calls for reassessment at least once a shift or every two hours; in a busy unit, that cadence is hard to hold to.

Aceso Sphere lets patients self-report on the same standardized scale directly from the in-room screen — on their own schedule, not just when a clinician happens to ask — and routes each score straight to the care team and the chart. Because the scale carries over across the stay and across shift changes, pain is tracked as a trend the whole team can see, not a series of disconnected data points captured whenever someone remembered to ask.

One Screen, Every Protocol

Falls, medication education, and pain reassessment are three examples of the same underlying pattern: hospitals write good protocols, then ask a rotating, overextended staff to remember and execute every one of them, for every patient, every shift, with no system that reminds anyone in the moment. Aceso Sphere takes the protocol-driven trigger — an EHR value that changed, a reassessment window that opened, a risk score that crossed a threshold — and surfaces it in the room, to staff and patient simultaneously, instead of leaving it in a binder or a training module. The standard of care stops depending on the cognitive overload of staff, who’s on shift or how busy the floor is that day.

Patient safety rarely fails because a hospital didn’t have the right protocol. It fails when the protocol exists somewhere the care team can’t see it in the moment that matters. Aceso Sphere treats the patient room as the place where fall prevention, medication understanding, and pain management protocols actually happen — because that’s where they do.

See how Aceso Sphere strengthens patient safety in every room →

Explore more Aceso Sphere solutions at aceso.com.

Aceso Interactive Inc.  |  aceso.com  |  Sources: AHRQ, AHRQ PSNet, Journal of Patient Safety, New England Journal of Medicine (Jencks et al., 2009), peer-reviewed medication adherence and readmission studies (NIH/PMC), The Joint Commission, AHRQ-published pain assessment literature (2009-2026)

August 2026

Leveraging Aceso Sphere to Bridge Language Gaps

Twenty-five million people in the United States have limited English proficiency. Every one of them is a hospital patient eventually — and for most of them, understanding a diagnosis, a discharge plan, or a consent form still depends on whether an interpreter happens to be available at the moment they need one. Aceso Sphere Patient Engagement incorporates language access on the same screen already in every room, so it stops being a scheduling problem, or a device problem, and becomes a one-touch capability.

A Civil Rights Requirement

Language access in healthcare isn’t a patient satisfaction enhancement — it’s federal law. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 requires any hospital that accepts federal financial assistance (Medicare or Medicaid funding) — which is to say, nearly every hospital in the country — to take reasonable steps to ensure meaningful access for patients with limited English proficiency. Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act builds directly on that foundation, defining what “meaningful access” means in practice: a qualified interpreter, provided free of charge, in a timely manner, without asking the patient to supply their own. CMS’s hospital Conditions of Participation reinforce the same standard at the bedside — patient rights information has to be provided in a language and manner the patient can actually understand, and Joint Commission standards tie the same expectation directly to accreditation.

Parts of the 2024 Section 1557 rule have been contested in court, but that litigation is about separate provisions. The Title VI obligation to provide language access is a decades-old civil rights requirement that stands on its own, independent of how that litigation resolves. Hospitals don’t have a reason to wait on it.

The Benefit

The compliance case is only half the story — the outcomes case is just as direct. Language barriers are linked to longer stays, more treatment delays, and higher readmission rates. One hospital system that made professional interpreters consistently and conveniently available saw 30-day readmission rates for Limited English Proficiency (LEP) patients drop from 17.8% to 13.4%, saving an estimated $161,000 a month in avoided readmissions. Across the literature, patient satisfaction is the single outcome most consistently and substantially improved by reliable interpreter access.

That satisfaction signal shows up directly in HCAHPS — communication with nurses, communication with doctors, and discharge information are three of the survey’s core domains, and all three depend on the patient actually understanding what’s being said. A patient who receives instructions in a language they don’t speak isn’t a communication success just because words were said in the room.

One Screen, Every Language

Most hospitals handle language access the way they handle virtual care: bolted on. A PC on a cart. A tablet kept at the nurses’ station. A wait for the one bilingual staff member on shift. Each workaround adds delay, and delay is exactly what a frightened, confused, or urgently ill patient can’t afford.

Aceso Sphere turns the television in the room into the interpreter access point. On-demand video interpretation launches from the same screen the patient already uses for entertainment, education, and service requests — no separate device to locate, charge, or disinfect. Discharge instructions and condition-specific education content can be delivered translated, not just interpreted live. Closed captioning and adjustable text size extend the same access to patients with hearing or vision limitations, folding language access and disability access into one connected capability instead of two separate ones.

The Bottom Line

Language access sits at the intersection of two things every hospital has to get right: regulatory compliance and patient experience. Aceso Sphere treats it as neither an afterthought nor a separate program — it’s one more way the connected patient room does what a hospital already promised its patients it would do.

Explore more Aceso Sphere solutions at aceso.com.

One Screen, Every Connection: Video Collaboration via the Aceso Sphere

Nearly every patient room is positioned for today’s virtual care program needs: a smart television and a camera. Aceso Sphere can turn that television — paired with an in-room camera — into the video endpoint for every remote encounter a hospital runs, from virtual nursing and physician consults, to tele-sitting, rounding, family visits, and more. One screen. One touch to connect. No cart to chase down the hall. And flexibility that enables a cost effective strategy.

The Problem with Virtual Care: Scalability

Most hospitals in North America weren’t designed with virtual care in mind. So most adapted — and they wheeled it in. A cart for tele-sitting, a tablet for interpreter services, a separate device for consults. Each one is another specialty-specific asset to track, charge, disinfect, and troubleshoot, and each one asks staff to learn a different interface under pressure. The result is a virtual care program that works in pilot but stalls at scale.

Aceso Sphere takes the opposite approach: virtual care rides on infrastructure that’s likely already in the room. Or can be with a little investment. The in-room screen and camera become a standing video endpoint, connected through the same platform patients already use for entertainment, education, and service requests.

One Platform, Every Use Case

Virtual nursing. 66% of nurse leaders report plans to launch telehealth nursing models, using virtual nurses to handle admission interviews, discharge teaching, and medication double-checks so bedside staff can focus on hands-on care. That model can only work with a platform approach: a hub that can share, consume and organize the delivery, and enable cost effective scalability. 

Tele-sitting. The same endpoint that hosts a virtual nurse visit supports continuous remote observation for fall and safety risk, without a dedicated cart/device parked at the bedside.

Rounding and specialist consults. Two-way video at the bedside supports routine rounding as well as formal consults, bringing neurology, psychiatry, and other specialties into any connected room — particularly valuable for rural and critical-access facilities, and for after-hours coverage anywhere. It also reduces PPE use and unnecessary staff exposure for isolation patients.

Interpreter services and family presence. On-demand video interpretation removes the need for a separate device or a delayed in-person visit. Family members who can’t be there in person join rounds, consults, and everyday conversations through the same screen the patient already knows how to use.

Build on What’s Already There

Aceso Sphere is an open platform, not a point solution dependent on proprietary hardware. The Sphere platform is the hub to the video and communication tools hospitals may already run, and to the EHR, so a virtual nurse or specialist joins the call with the same chart context as the team at the bedside.

The Bottom Line

Virtual nursing, tele-sitting, rounding, specialist consults, interpreter services, family presence — hospitals tend to build these as separate programs with separate hardware. Aceso Sphere treats them as one capability: video collaboration, available in every bed, on the screen that’s already there.

See how Aceso Sphere is the hub for video collaboration →

Explore more Aceso Sphere solutions at aceso.com.

Real-Time Patient Feedback: How the Aceso Sphere Turns the Patient Room into a Satisfaction Engine

Patient satisfaction has always mattered clinically. Now it matters financially. Under CMS’s Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program, HCAHPS data drives the Person and Community Engagement domain — 25% of the score that determines Medicare reimbursement, with a 2% withhold on base operating DRG payments redistributed based on performance. A hospital’s HCAHPS results aren’t just a reputation metric anymore; they’re tied directly to the bottom line.

The problem: HCAHPS is a lagging indicator. It surveys patients after discharge, long after the noisy night, the delayed call light response, or the confusing discharge instructions actually happened. By the time a low score shows up in the data, the patient is already gone and the damage is done.

The Aceso Sphere closes that gap.

From TV in the Room to a Real-Time Feedback Channel

Through the Aceso Sphere, every in-room screen becomes a live channel for feedback, service requests, and surveys — available to patients via pillow speaker, remote, mobile app, or voice, with no extra hardware required. Instead of waiting for a post-discharge survey, care teams see issues the moment they surface: a request for pain medication, a complaint about room temperature, a quick pulse-check survey on how rounding went that morning.

This isn’t a hypothetical benefit. Research on interactive, real-time rounding shows patient satisfaction scores improving across 7 of 10 HCAHPS domains when feedback loops are two-way instead of one-way, and issues addressed within an hour of being raised improve scores across 8 of 10 domains — a window that closes fast, with impact dropping off after just two hours. Other analyses have found real-time feedback and fast follow-up lifting HCAHPS scores by as much as 18%.

Why Speed Changes the Outcome

The Sphere’s adaptive portal and intelligent display control mean requests and feedback route instantly to the right care team member, whether that’s a nurse, an EVS request, or a service recovery flag for charge nurse follow-up. Because the portal travels with the patient across care settings, that feedback loop doesn’t break when a patient moves from the ED to Med/Surg — the context, and the ability to respond, moves with them.

That speed is the difference between a resolved issue and a remembered complaint. Every problem caught and fixed in real time is one that never becomes a “poor” mark on a discharge survey.

The Reimbursement Case

The chain is straightforward: real-time feedback and requests lead to faster service recovery, faster service recovery leads to better in-the-moment patient experience, better experience leads to higher HCAHPS scores, and higher HCAHPS scores lead to a larger share of the VBP incentive pool rather than a penalty. For hospitals managing thousands of discharges a year, even a few points of movement in the Person and Community Engagement domain translates into real dollars — on top of the more durable win of patients who felt heard and cared for.

Real-time patient feedback isn’t a nice-to-have experience feature. It’s a direct lever on the metrics CMS uses to decide reimbursement.

Click here to learn more!

Sources

CMS Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program: cms.gov

The Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) Program – CMS.gov

$50 Billion for Rural Health: How Aceso Helps Providers Win — and Deliver

The Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) is one of the most significant federal investments in rural healthcare in a generation — $50 billion over five years, distributed to all 50 states, with an average first-year award of $200 million. For rural hospitals, critical access hospitals, and the communities they serve, this funding represents an opportunity to modernize care delivery, close persistent access gaps, and demonstrate measurable results.

For states and their rural health partners, the question is no longer whether to act — it’s how to build a technology strategy that satisfies federal requirements, delivers on state plan commitments, and produces outcomes that can be documented and defended at every funding review.

Aceso is ready to help.

What the Program Requires

Authorized by Congressional action, CMS has been explicit about where it expects states to focus, and those priorities map to what rural facilities need, and capabilities Aceso delivers:

Innovation and Technology. States are required to foster the use of innovative technologies that promote efficient care delivery, data security, and patient access to digital health tools. CMS specifically calls out remote care access, data sharing, cybersecurity, and emerging technologies. States can also direct up to 10% of their RHTP allocation to a Technology Catalyst Fund — a competitive, vendor-focused model for deploying innovative patient-facing technology.

Virtual Care. CMS incentivizes states to expand Medicaid coverage for telehealth and remote patient monitoring, and rewards states that join interstate licensure compacts. Virtual care isn’t optional infrastructure — it’s a scoring advantage. States that can demonstrate real-world virtual care deployment will be better positioned in future funding cycles.

Patient Satisfaction. The program requires measurable improvements in patient health outcomes and experience. For inpatient facilities, that means HCAHPS. For rural health systems, where patients often travel long distances and face limited choices, experience scores aren’t just a metric — they’re a signal of whether the system is working.

Staff Efficiency and Workforce Development. The RHTP explicitly funds efforts to attract and retain healthcare workers in rural communities, support top-of-license practice, and reduce the administrative burden that drives burnout and turnover. Workflow efficiency tools aren’t a luxury — they are a fundable activity.

Innovative Care Models. States are encouraged to develop flexible care arrangements that coordinate across settings and improve chronic disease management. Technology that unifies patient, clinical, and operational data across care environments is foundational to making those models work.

How Aceso Sphere Addresses Each Imperative

Aceso Sphere is a unified intelligence platform that connects clinical, operational, and patient experience data into one shared, real-time context. It is modular, open, and engineered to integrate with the EHR systems and communication tools rural facilities commonly use.

Innovation and Technology

Aceso Sphere is architected as an open platform — with no proprietary hardware. It consumes data from EHR systems, RTLS, dietary, environmental services, relaxation and entertainment content, and communication APIs (Zoom, Pexip, etc.) and delivers that intelligence to the bedside. For states making the case for technology investment under RHTP, Aceso provides documented integration pathways, industry-standard partnerships (HP, LG, Samsung, Iron Bow, Zoom), and a platform designed to scale from a single critical access hospital to a multi-facility, multi-state health system.

The Aceso Sphere platform’s modular design means clients can deploy solutions incrementally — starting with the highest-priority use cases and expanding as additional funding becomes available across the five-year program window.

Virtual Care

Aceso Sphere virtual care integration solves the primary problem that has limited most rural virtual programs: cost and complexity at the room level.

Rather than deploying expensive carts or dedicated tablets, Aceso turns the television already in every patient room — paired with an attached camera — into a complete virtual collaboration endpoint. Clinicians and patients launch virtual rounds, sitting, interpreter services, and family video connections with a single touch. No app switching. No IT call. No cart to find.

This value-engineered approach makes it realistic to deploy virtual care in every bed — not just high-acuity units — which is exactly the kind of scalable, room-level virtual care infrastructure CMS is looking to fund and states are being incentivized to demonstrate.

Patient Satisfaction and Safety

Aceso Sphere patient engagement streamlines communication and access at the bedside —by leveraging the TV in the room, Aceso delivers a concierge-grade experience covering care plan visibility, risk awareness and intervention, personalized education, service requests, entertainment, dining, and discharge instructions.

The platform is purpose-built to improve patient safety: fall prevention/interventions, and patient satisfaction and HCAHPS domains: communication with nurses and doctors, responsiveness to needs, quietness, and discharge information. Service requests and survey responses route automatically, so nurses spend less time chasing mundane tasks and more time at the bedside, and patient satisfaction leaders can get survey data in near real-time. The result is a measurable lift in satisfaction scores tied to a documented technology investment — exactly what RHTP reporting will require.

Staff Efficiency

The Aceso Care Team Sphere gives clinical staff shared, real-time situational awareness — patient status, prioritized tasks, alerts, plan of care, and handoff context — across roles and shifts from a single interface. The Operations Sphere extends that visibility to leadership: patient flow, staffing strain, safety risks, and experience signals, all in one view.

For rural facilities where staff wear many hats and turnover is a persistent threat, tools that reduce cognitive load, eliminate redundant documentation, and surface the right information at the right time are retention investments. Aceso’s Digital Whiteboard and Door Board solutions pull directly from clinical documentation, eliminating the manual transcription burden that consumes nursing time and introduces error.

Innovative Care Models

Aceso Sphere’s unified platform architecture is what makes coordinated, flexible care models actually work. When patient data, care team context, and operational signals share a common real-time foundation, handoffs are richer, virtual and in-person care are genuinely integrated, and care management programs can be documented and reported with the rigor RHTP requires.

A Partner Built for This Moment

The Rural Health Transformation Program is a five-year commitment. The states and health systems that succeed will be those that deploy technology solutions capable of generating measurable outcomes, scaling across their rural footprint, and sustaining performance through multiple funding cycles.

Aceso has been building healthcare-only technology since 2009. Our platform is deployed in facilities ranging from large academic health systems to community hospitals and critical access hospitals. Importantly, we understand the constraints rural facilities operate under — the workforce pressures, the budget realities, the EHR diversity — and we have built Aceso Sphere to work within them, not around them.

If your state or health system is developing its RHTP implementation plan, Aceso can help you map solutions to your specific grant commitments, identify the right deployment sequence, and build the outcome documentation framework you will need for year-over-year reporting.

The window to act is now. First-year RHTP funds must be expended by September 30, 2026.

Let’s Talk

Aceso is actively working with rural health systems and state implementation partners to respond to the Rural Health Transformation Program. We offer complimentary assessments to help organizations understand how Aceso Sphere maps to their RHTP plan and what deployment looks like in their environment.

Request a complimentary RHTP discovery.

Learn more about the Rural Health Transformation Program at cms.gov and explore Aceso Sphere solutions at aceso.com.

Aceso Sphere: Delivering the Promise of Technology to the Patient Room

NOTE: This blog post is the first in a series of brief position papers that will describe the current state of patient-focused technology in the patient room, and how Aceso is delivering solutions to meet the ever-escalating demand for innovation.

How connected patient room technology improves satisfaction, communication, care team capacity, patient safety and throughput.

From a technology perspective, the patient room has historically been slow to implement solutions focused on the patient as a consumer. In the past, a comfortable bed, a TV, a nurse call button, an out-of-date whiteboard, and maybe a window view comprised the patient room strategy. That is changing. As hospitals face tightening margins, workforce shortages, and rising patient expectations, the room itself is becoming a critical component of the care infrastructure — a connected patient room platform can help drive outcomes, efficiency, and impact the patient experience.

Aceso Sphere is an intelligent, open platform built to improve the patient experience, and care delivery. Communication is streamlined, care teams operate more efficiently, and patients and families become part of the care team. The result is a better experience, and better outcomes…for patients and providers.

PATIENT SATISFACTION.  In addition to better outcomes, patient experience carries direct financial weight — HCAHPS scores feed roughly a quarter of a hospital’s Medicare Value-Based Purchasing adjustment. Hospitals using point-of-care surveys and feedback tools on the in-room screen, rather than a phone call weeks after discharge, catch dissatisfaction while it is still fixable; hospitals can impact HCAHPS scores within days of deployment – satisfaction stops being a lagging indicator and becomes something staff can act on during the stay.

PATIENT SAFETY. Falls remain one of the most common, most preventable sources of inpatient harm – and Aceso Sphere can help bridge the gap between awareness and action. Integration with intelligent sensors and bed/chair exit monitoring can flag pre-fall movement up to 30 seconds in advance, while models fed by live EHR data flag a patient whose fall risk has risen mid-stay, not just at admission. Surfacing those signals – and reinforcing awareness to staff and to the patient directly – gives the care team the tools and knowledge needed to intervene before an incident, not just document one after the fact.

COMMUNICATION.  Seamless and real time communication can be an easy first step. Consider an automated whiteboard that is updated as conditions change; automating patient requests via the patient room TV, and providing access to important diagnosis information, goals for the day, or meal ordering, among many other conveniences. Modernizing communication and empowering patients can have an outsized effect on the patient stay. Responses to patient requests can be acted on more quickly – and care teams can focus work at the top of their license. Virtual care and virtual family visits can be initiated with one tap, and valuable time and attention can be delivered when needed.

CARE TEAM EFFICIENCY.  Nurses report spending up 15-20% of a shift on indirect tasks — coordination, requests, chasing down basic needs — rather than direct care. Most of that burden is not clinical: a blanket, ice, a room turned over for the next admission. Aceso Sphere lets patients route routine requests like ice, comfort items, or housekeeping straight to the team responsible for fulfilling them, instead of every request landing in the nurse call queue. Less noise on nurse call means more time at the bedside.

OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY.  Length of stay is one of the few levers that affects clinical, financial, and capacity outcomes at once — and discharge delay is rarely about the patient being ready; it is about the next step (transport, pharmacy, paperwork, a ride home) not being visible to everyone who needs it. Studies of discharge-readiness tracking show meaningful reductions in length of stay at scale. Aceso Sphere can surface each discharge milestone directly in the room, visible to the patient, family, and every member of the care team, so the whole team works off the same checklist and status. At an average cost of roughly $3,000+ per inpatient day, even modest reductions in length of stay translate into millions of dollars in recovered capacity for a mid-size hospital.

Patient satisfaction, patient safety, communication, care team capacity, and discharge throughput are usually managed as four separate problems, with four separate solutions. They do not have to be. Aceso Sphere treats the patient room as a single connected platform — the last mile to the patient bedside – because the room is where good outcomes start.

Aceso® Interactive Inc.  ·  aceso.com  ·  Sources: NIH National Library of Medicine: Time and Motion Analysis

Aceso is Heading to InfoComm 2026 — Find Us in the Zoom Booth

We’re excited to announce that Aceso will be at InfoComm 2026, the premier professional AV industry event, taking place June 17–19 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

In addition to representing our digital signage capabilities, and meeting with our partners in the signage space, this year, we’re partnering with Zoom to bring the Aceso Sphere platform to the show floor. Stop by the Zoom booth to see a live demonstration of how the Sphere is redefining the patient room experience — from adaptive portals and intelligent display control to fully integrated virtual care.

Whether you’re in healthcare IT, clinical operations, or AV integration, InfoComm is the perfect place to see firsthand how the Aceso Sphere turns the patient TV into a powerful care platform.

Come see us at InfoComm 2026:

•  Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV

•  June 17–19, 2026

•  Visit us at the Zoom booth

We look forward to connecting with you in Las Vegas. Contact us to schedule time to meet with our team at the show.

The Aceso Sphere>Digital Signage: Transforming Healthcare Communication via Real-Time Digital Communications

Michel Perreault, Director, Digital Signage at Aceso Interactive

In today’s healthcare environment, communication needs to be instant, accurate, and adaptable. Patients expect a modern experience. Staff members need reliable operational tools. Administrators need scalable systems that reduce costs while improving engagement. Informatics leaders need dependable uptime and 24/7/365 support. And Visitors and guests need to be informed, educated and entertained.

That’s where the Aceso Sphere>Operations Sphere> Digital Signage solution delivers measurable value.

Designed specifically for healthcare organizations, the Aceso Digital Signage solution combines enterprise-wide content management, white glove implementation services, and ongoing expert support into a comprehensive, easy-to-use digital signage platform that transforms how hospitals and healthcare systems communicate.

An Efficient and Innovative Approach to Healthcare Communication

Traditional printed signage creates ongoing operational challenges:

• Physician directories become outdated quickly
• Wayfinding information changes constantly
• Event announcements require repeated printing
• Donor recognition displays are expensive to maintain
• Internal communications are fragmented across departments
• Time to deploy can be delayed due to approvals/red tape
• The hidden expense of maintaining a legacy communications strategy

Aceso Digital Signage replaces static communication with dynamic, real-time digital experiences that can be managed centrally across an entire enterprise.

Whether deployed in hospital lobbies, outpatient clinics, physician offices, surgery centers, or administrative facilities, the platform enables organizations to instantly update messaging, improve the patient experience, and reduce operational inefficiencies.

Enterprise CMS Built for Healthcare

At the core of Aceso Digital Signage is a powerful enterprise Content Management System (CMS) designed to simplify communication management at scale.

Healthcare organizations can securely manage and schedule content across one facility or hundreds of locations from a centralized platform. Authorized users can update directories, announcements, emergency messaging, donor recognition, cafeteria menus, health education content, and promotional materials in real time, anytime, anywhere.

Key benefits include:

• Centralized enterprise-wide content control
• Role-based user permissions
• Real-time updates across all displays
• Scheduled and automated content publishing
• Scalable deployment across multiple facilities
• Consistent branding and messaging organization-wide

The result is faster communication, improved operational agility, and significantly reduced administrative burden.

Real-Time Patient and Care Team Communication Improves Experience

Patients and visitors often arrive at healthcare facilities feeling anxious or overwhelmed. Clear and timely communication plays a critical role in creating a positive experience.

Aceso Digital Signage enables healthcare organizations to provide:

• Real-time physician and department directories
• Dynamic wayfinding information
• Wait time updates
• Health and wellness education
• Emergency notifications
• Event and community announcements
• Nurse Station Census Boards
• Real-time staff communications

Unlike static signage, digital displays can be updated instantly as providers move locations, departments change, schedules evolve, or an urgent message needs to be displayed.

This flexibility improves navigation, reduces confusion, and enhances the overall patient journey.

Eliminating the Ongoing Cost of Printed Physician Directories

One of the most immediate and measurable returns on investment from digital signage is the elimination of recurring print costs.

Traditional physician directories require frequent reprinting due to:

• Provider additions and departures
• Office relocations
• Specialty updates
• Branding changes
• Wear and tear

These updates create ongoing expenses in printing, labor, installation, and replacement.

With Aceso Digital Signage, updates can be completed in minutes through the enterprise CMS without replacing physical signage. Organizations gain:

• Reduced printing costs
• Lower maintenance expenses
• Faster update cycles
• Improved directory accuracy
• Reduced staff workload
• An innovative look, feel and experience

Over time, the savings can be substantial—especially across multi-location healthcare systems.

Modern Donor Recognition for Healthcare Foundations

Healthcare foundations and development teams also benefit significantly from digital signage.

Traditional donor walls are expensive to redesign and difficult to update when new contributions are received. Static recognition systems can delay acknowledgment and limit storytelling opportunities.

Aceso Digital Signage provides a modern alternative through dynamic donor recognition displays that can:

• Instantly recognize new donors
• Highlight campaigns and fundraising initiatives
• Feature videos and impact stories
• Showcase naming opportunities
• Rotate recognition categories and sponsorship levels
• Celebrate community partnerships in real time

This flexibility creates a more engaging and meaningful recognition experience while reducing the cost and complexity of maintaining traditional donor displays.

Digital Signage Consulting Services

Aceso Clients benefit from decades of experience and thousands of endpoint implementations. That experience and practical guidance can be leveraged to design and build the ideal plan for any use case: internal/external communication, wayfinding, foundation donor boards, clinical dashboards, cafeteria/menu, and innovative digital signage use cases.

Aceso Digital Signage Consultants can help build the plan and ensure ongoing success.

White Glove Design, Implementation, and Support

Technology alone does not guarantee success. Effective deployment requires strategy, thoughtful design, and long-term support.

Aceso delivers a true white-glove experience from initial planning through ongoing management/operations and 24/7 support.

Strategic Design Services

Every healthcare environment has unique communication goals, workflows, and branding requirements. Aceso works collaboratively with organizations to design customized digital signage experiences that align with operational objectives and patient engagement strategies.

Seamless Implementation

The Aceso Digital Signage Consulting team manages deployment with minimal disruption to clinical and administrative operations. From hardware coordination and installation planning to CMS configuration and content strategy, every aspect of implementation is professionally managed.

Ongoing Management and Expert Support

Healthcare organizations require dependable systems and responsive service. Aceso provides ongoing and personalized managed services and support to ensure content remains current, systems perform reliably, and teams maximize the value of their investment.

This comprehensive support model allows healthcare organizations to focus on patient care while Aceso manages the technology experience behind the scenes.

The ROI of Digital Signage in Healthcare

Digital signage is no longer simply an aesthetic upgrade—it is a strategic operational investment.

Organizations implementing Aceso Digital Signage often realize ROI through:

• Reduced print and replacement costs
• Lower administrative labor
• Improved communication efficiency
• Faster information updates
• Enhanced patient satisfaction
• Increased donor engagement opportunities
• Better organizational branding and consistency

Because content can be updated instantly and centrally managed, healthcare systems gain a communication infrastructure that evolves with organizational needs.

Future-Ready Communication Starts Here

Healthcare communication continues to evolve, and organizations need solutions that are flexible, scalable, and easy to manage.

Aceso Sphere> Operations Sphere>Digital Signage empowers healthcare systems to modernize communication, improve operational efficiency, and create more engaging experiences for patients, visitors, staff, and donors alike.

From enterprise CMS management to white glove implementation and support, Aceso Digital Signage delivers a complete healthcare digital signage solution designed for today’s connected healthcare environment.

Michel Perreault is Director of the Aceso Digital Signage division of Aceso Interactive and can be reached via email at Michel.Perreault@Aceso.com

The Difference Between Patient Engagement and Patient Experience

In healthcare, “patient engagement” and “patient experience” are often used as if they are the same idea. They aren’t. They’re close cousins — each shaped by the other — but they describe different things, are measured in different ways, and ask different questions of the technology that supports them. Treating them as interchangeable is one of the most common mistakes hospital leaders make when they buy patient-room software, and it’s a mistake that quietly costs HCAHPS points, nurse time, and capital.

This post defines both terms, lays them side by side, explains why the distinction matters for hospital reimbursement, and shows how a modern smart patient room ties the two together so that engagement and experience reinforce each other instead of competing for budget.

Quick definitions

What is patient experience?

Patient experience is the sum of every interaction a patient has with the health system — clinical and non-clinical — across the care journey. It’s scheduling friction, the cleanliness of the room, how a nurse explained a medication, whether the discharge instructions made sense, the bill that arrived three weeks later. The Beryl Institute defines patient experience as “the sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization’s culture, that influence patient perceptions across the continuum of care.”

Patient experience is measured. The dominant U.S. instrument is the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems survey — HCAHPS — which asks 32 questions of discharged patients about communication, responsiveness, environment, and overall rating. Results are publicly reported on the CMS Care Compare website and tied directly to the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing program.

What is patient engagement?

Patient engagement is the degree to which a patient is an active participant in their own care. Engagement is what the patient does — watching the assigned diabetes education video, completing the pre-op checklist, asking the right question on rounds, signing into the portal, taking the medication on schedule. CMS describes engaged patients as “knowledgeable, skilled, and confident in managing their own health and health care.”

Engagement is harder to measure with a single survey. It shows up in portal-activation rates, education-completion rates, medication adherence, no-show rates, and — more recently — in the analytics layered onto interactive patient care platforms in the room itself.

Patient engagement vs. patient experience: a side-by-side

Read across any row and the difference becomes clearer. Patient experience asks how the hospital showed up. Patient engagement asks whether the patient leaned in. The first is mostly about the system; the second is mostly about the person.

Why the distinction matters

1. They are measured — and rewarded — differently

HCAHPS scores feed directly into the Hospital Value-Based Purchasing formula and influence Medicare reimbursement. Engagement metrics, by contrast, drive readmission penalties, population-health outcomes, and shared-savings performance in value-based contracts. A hospital that conflates the two will overinvest in survey response rates and underinvest in the upstream behavior change that actually moves outcomes — or vice versa.

2. They have different root causes

If “communication with nurses” scores are sliding, the answer is rarely “more patient education videos.” That’s an experience problem with experience-side levers: rounding, response times, scripts. If readmissions for heart failure are climbing, the answer is rarely “more comfortable rooms.” That’s an engagement problem with engagement-side levers: condition-specific education, teach-back, post-discharge follow-up. Treating both with the same tool produces a tool that’s mediocre at both jobs.

3. They reinforce each other — but only if you design for it

Strong experience makes engagement easier: a patient who feels heard is more willing to participate. Strong engagement makes experience better: a patient who understands the plan reports higher satisfaction with communication. The compounding only happens when the same data, the same care team, and the same in-room platform serve both jobs.

What this looks like in the patient room

Picture two adjacent rooms in the same hospital.

Room A: experience-led, engagement-thin

The TV plays welcome content. There’s a paper menu. The dry-erase whiteboard has yesterday’s nurse name on it. The patient watches a movie, presses the call button when they need help, and rates communication on the HCAHPS survey based on the warmth of the staff. Experience can be excellent here. Engagement is whatever the patient brings on their own.

Room B: experience and engagement, integrated

The same TV surfaces a personalized care plan pulled from the EHR. The whiteboard updates itself with the care team, today’s goals, the next test, the anticipated discharge date. The patient is auto-prescribed two short education videos for their condition and acknowledges them with a tap. A pain-assessment prompt appears at the right interval. The nurse sees the same update on the dashboard or door board and walks in already knowing what the patient has and hasn’t completed. If anxiety spikes overnight, a virtual nurse joins by video without anyone leaving the room. The HCAHPS survey afterwards reflects both: the warmth of the staff and the clarity of the plan.

Room A is good experience. Room B is integrated experience and engagement. The technology in Room B is what Aceso calls a smart patient room, an interactive patient care system, or — collectively — a patient engagement platform. The label matters less than the architecture: one source of patient context, surfaced through every endpoint in the room (TV, tablet, digital whiteboard, video device), driven by the EHR, and woven into the care team’s workflow rather than added on top of it.

Three places engagement and experience converge

The digital whiteboard

A traditional dry-erase whiteboard is an experience artifact — it shows the patient who is on their care team. A digital whiteboard populated from the EHR (sometimes called an eCareBoard) becomes an engagement artifact too: it can show goals for the day, scheduled tests, dietary restrictions, mobility orders, and the next pain assessment. Patients who can see the plan participate in the plan. Nurses don’t spend time updating it because it updates itself.

Education, entertainment, and more….all on the same device

If the only way to deliver assigned education is a separate tablet that nobody hands to the patient, completion rates collapse. If education lives on the same screen as the news and the meal menu — and the system knows when it has and hasn’t been watched — completion rises and the care team gets actionable data. Experience and engagement share infrastructure. The result will be a more organized experience, less clutter in the patient room, fewer devices to manage, and lower costs to maintain and support.

Virtual care in the room

Virtual nursing, tele-sitting, and remote specialist consults are usually framed as workforce solutions. They’re also major engagement and experience accelerators: faster answers, fewer interruptions to bedside nurses, and a patient who feels seen at 2 a.m. without anyone rushing in. According to the AHA, hospitals piloting virtual nursing report meaningful gains in both nurse time-at-bedside and patient-rated communication scores.

Where Aceso fits

The Aceso Sphere platform is built around the idea that experience and engagement should share infrastructure. The Aceso Sphere turns the in-room TV into the patient’s window into their stay — education, entertainment, meals, and personalized care information from the EHR. The integrated digital whiteboard auto-updates from the same data. Aceso Virtual Care brings video into the same “Pane of Glass” or digital end point, so a virtual nurse, a translator, or a family member is one tap away. By turning the TV in the room into a customizable “Pane of Glass”, the Aceso Sphere platform consolidates all of it into a single view for clinicians, with no manual updates and no separate logins. The result is a patient room where good experience and active engagement aren’t separate programs — they’re the same product, working at the same time.

Frequently asked questions

Is patient engagement a subset of patient experience?

No. They overlap, but engagement extends well outside the four walls of the hospital — into portals, post-discharge calls, medication adherence, and chronic-condition self-management. Experience is mostly bounded by the care episode.

Which one moves HCAHPS scores?

HCAHPS is a patient experience survey, so experience-side levers — communication, responsiveness, environment, discharge clarity — are the most direct movers. But engagement is an indirect mover: patients who understand their plan rate their nurses’ communication higher and their discharge information clearer. Hospitals that improve engagement typically see HCAHPS scores rise as a side effect.

Is patient engagement just the patient portal?

The portal is a piece. True engagement also includes inpatient education, real-time decision support, post-discharge follow-up, and — increasingly — in-room interactive technology that meets the patient where they are during the stay, not only after they go home.

Do we need separate vendors for engagement and experience?

Not in the inpatient setting. The leading interactive patient care platforms now serve both jobs from the same in-room infrastructure. Buying separate point solutions for surveying, education, video, and the whiteboard usually creates more workflow burden than value.

How does virtual nursing relate to all this?

Virtual nursing is one of the strongest convergence points: it improves experience (faster answers, less waiting) and engagement (more touchpoints, more education, more chances to ask questions) at once, while reducing burden on the bedside team.

Ready to see this in your rooms?

Aceso’s team can walk through what an integrated experience-and-engagement platform looks like in your environment, from a single unit pilot to enterprise rollout.

Sources

• CMS — HCAHPS: Patients’ Perspectives of Care Survey
• AHA — Virtual Nursing in Action: Technology That Gives Nurses More Time
• AHA — Why Smart Hospitals Are Defining the Future of Patient Care
• AJMC — Relationships Between Patient Portal Activation and Patient Satisfaction Scores
• Penn LDI — Surveys of Hospital Patients Evolve

Honoring the People Behind Every Patient Experience

This week, healthcare organizations across the country mark Patient Experience Week — a moment to honor the relationship between the Provider and the Patient, and to recognize the people whose work shapes how Patients feel cared for, heard, and understood. At Aceso, it’s a week we take to heart.

Patient experience isn’t just a department or a survey response metric. It’s the quiet sum of thousands of small moments that matter: the Nurse who explains a procedure one more time so a worried family can breathe easier, the EVS or Dietary team member who remembers a name, the Clinician who goes the extra mile, the PA whose smile lands at exactly the right moment, and the Administrator that’s focused on building a caring culture. Each person and every interaction creates a chance to remind someone that they are more than their diagnosis.

At Aceso, we’re proud to stand alongside the people who put patients at the center of everything, and we solute the Care Teams, Support Staff, Patient Experience Leaders, and everyone working to make healthcare more compassionate: thank you. Your work matters more than any week of recognition can capture. This week, and every week.

#PXWeek2026 #PatientExperience #HealthcareHeroes