Waiting is the one thing every patient does. DITA Platform gives your hospital its own reading library — for patients, for families in the waiting room, and for clinical staff — on unit tablets, on the family's own phone, and offline.
Most hospital libraries are a trolley of donated paperbacks and a locked cupboard of clinical texts. Neither reaches the patient who can't get out of bed, or the registrar on a night shift.
Two libraries, one platform
The unit and the staff room have different shelves.
One catalog, split by who you are. Patients and families see reading; clinical staff see reference. Neither has to wade through the other.
Patients & families
Something to read, right now.
No library card, no queue, no trolley round. A patient enters the code from the card by their bed and is reading in twenty seconds, on the phone already in their hand. Nobody on your staff sets anything up, and you buy no devices.
Long stays and short waits. Novels, short stories, audiobooks and magazines for people who may be there for an hour or a month.
Paediatric units. Picture books with read-along audio, for a child who can't hold a book or a parent who can't stay all night.
Accessible reading. Large type, high contrast, screen reader and audio, for patients who can't manage print.
Every language on the unit. Collections in the languages your patients actually speak, including right-to-left scripts.
Health information. Your own patient leaflets and discharge guidance sit on the same shelf, always the current version.
Clinical staff
Reference where the work is.
Your licensed clinical texts, protocols and training material, reachable from any workstation or phone on shift — not from one terminal in the library.
Licensed reference works. Whatever you already license, hosted under the terms you agreed, with access by department.
Local protocols. Your own guidelines and SOPs, versioned, searchable and always the approved edition.
Training & CPD. Assign reading to a cohort and see what has actually been read.
Offline on shift. Borrowed titles work in the basement, in theatre corridors, wherever the signal dies.
A patient reading a novel is a patient who isn't ringing the bell out of boredom. Unit staff notice that before anyone else does.
What hospital librarians tell us
Getting started
What a hospital rollout actually looks like.
Most hospitals start with one unit, not the whole estate. That is the right way to do it.
Week 1
Set up
Your library exists on your own subdomain, branded, with the free public-domain collection already loaded.
Week 2
Stock it
Add your own leaflets, protocols and any licensed titles. Curate shelves by unit and by language.
Week 3
One unit
Joining cards at the bedside and a poster in the waiting room. Watch what gets read.
Then
Widen
Roll out to the rest of the units, add staff reference and department access, connect your hospital sign-in.
Practicalities
The questions your IT and information governance teams will ask.
No clinical data. Joining takes an email address at most, and nothing is tied to a chart. Loans expire on their own after two weeks, so a patient who goes home mid-book finishes it and your staff never chase a return.
No devices to buy. Patients read on the phone already in their hand. It runs in the browser, so there is nothing to install and nothing to procure.
Shared devices. A unit tablet works today through the browser, with readers joining by code. A locked-down kiosk mode is on the roadmap, not shipped.
Staff sign-in. Staff sign in with email and password today; connecting your existing directory so clinical material follows role and department is on the roadmap after launch.
Regional hosting. Hosted in the region your governance policy requires, with GDPR-aligned export and deletion built in.
Content protection. Licensed titles are protected with open-standard LCP encryption, so publishers will let you host them.
Let's talk
Start with one unit.
Set it up yourself in about fifteen minutes, or tell us how many beds you're serving and what you already license. We'll set up your library and help you stock the first shelf.