Alexandra Drane

The Eliza Corporation, a health engagement company known for its automated outbound calls and voice recognition, announced the addition of multimedia mobile messaging to its offerings.

Eliza markets a software-as-a-service health engagement platform to employers, health plans, providers and pharmacy benefit managers for different use cases, including medication adherence and post-discharge follow up. The company's major selling point is that the system "smartly" interacts with customers, learning about them and remembering what it learned for future interactions. It also uses smart customer profiling to determine the best time of day and channel to reach a particular customer.

"We have a health engagement platform that tells us what we should be doing with whom, and then we shamelessly leverage whatever channel makes sense," Eliza founder Alexandra Drane told MobiHealthNews. "Our interest was basically extending the capabilities we have now to really be able to 'surround sound' people even more."

The company already reaches out via text messages, email, snail mail and the web in addition to the telephone. But the new offering allows Eliza clients to engage customers via their existing mobile health apps, adding in a permission-based secure messaging system that can push rich data messages, including video, to in-app inboxes.

"It's designed to leverage the investment our customers have already made in their mobile health app," said Drane. "So we're hoping to help our customers achieve the goal they're working with Eliza for and, in the process, to increase stickiness of -- and the engagement with -- the apps they've developed."

Drane said the Eliza might push video content to someone if the system determined that that user is an especially visual person, for instance. Eliza doesn't develop video content themselves, but their channel could deliver video content developed by a healthcare or health plan customer.

"These are capabilities we've been developing for a while," she said. "Mobile is a pretty obvious extension of a health engagement platform. What served for us as the impetus to talk about it publicly is the curiosity we're fielding from our customers. They've developed these assets like an mHealth app and they're not seeing the stickiness or the utilization."

This is the second story about an outreach platform adding multimedia in as many weeks. Text4Baby announced last week that its updated platform would include multimedia mobile messaging.