Providence is a health system based in Renton, Washington. Announced in October, the Praia Health platform will be spinning out of Providence having secured its first customer outside of Providence, and over a dozen digital health partners joining Praia’s digital ecosystem.  Providence operates 52 hospitals and 800 clinics across seven states – Alaska, Montana, Oregon, Washington, California, New Mexico and Texas.

Praia Health markets a digital health platform. This is the story of Praia Health and its innovative technology.

THE PROBLEM

While a proven strategic approach in other consumer-facing industries, getting a "digital flywheel" effect going in a health system has been essentially impossible – primarily because of the health system's deep, entrenched and required reliance upon its traditional electronic health record system, said Andy Chu, senior vice president of product and technology innovation at Providence.

"Any digital experience requiring access to a patient's medical record is severely limited by the legacy architecture and closed-system constraints of the EHR," he explained. "Because of this, generic patient portals such as MyChart have become the de-facto standard for a patient's digital interaction with their health system – and these experiences are limited to a patient's medical interaction alone.

"With 80-90% of health outcomes dependent upon factors outside of the medical encounter, this is obviously a problem," he continued. "To support their communities, health systems have expanded their offerings to include the programs, services and resources that positively impact health outcomes, but it's impossible to incorporate these offerings into the EHR patient portal, and extremely difficult and costly to create and maintain custom apps that reflect the full breadth of offerings."

Praia Health was designed to solve these complex barriers to digital transformation.

PROPOSAL

The promise was Praia Health would be able to create a "digital flywheel" for the Providence health system, enabling it to turn its web and mobile apps into a new, scalable channel for delivering highly personalized systems, Chu explained.

"The platform was designed to make delivering internal and third-party solutions to consumers practical, scalable and impactful for a health system," he noted. "Through Praia Health's ecosystem capabilities, health systems drive solution awareness and engagement and reduce acquisition costs.

"We expected the platform to become the base technology for our organization's digital transformation," he continued. "Enabling us to optimize current patient experience through digital, promote existing programs, extend offerings to include new consumer-facing lines of business, or guide users toward self-service support pathways – use case by use case."

MEETING THE CHALLENGE

The Praia Health Platform is used by Providence's Digital Innovation Group and the health system's marketing team to power the Providence and Providence Swedish mobile and web applications. These logged-in digital experiences enable patients to access their EHRs, book appointments, pay bills, and see recommendations for programs, services and resources highly relevant to them.

"The first step in implementation was a 'lift and shift' to Praia Health's Secure Patient Identity service, or SPI," Chu explained. "Once transitioned, SPI transparently supports all the system's signed-in digital experiences – including branded mobile and web apps, patient portal apps, and internally created or third-party applications.

"Once our identity had been modernized, Praia Health's PersonStore enabled us to securely marry consumer identity with consumer data from across the organization and beyond," he continued. "We then used the Praia Health Platform API to integrate the platform capabilities into our consumer-facing web and mobile experiences, enabling dynamic and individualized experiences that are open and secure and reflect the full breadth of our health system."

With Praia Health, the digital flywheel is fueled by adding new capabilities and systems to the platform ecosystem – and the platform supports the incorporation of any consumer service, program, system, resource or data source associated with the health system, whether they are proprietary or accessed through a third party.

"Our first use cases were focused on care-gap closure, billing and financial support, and navigation to self-serve capabilities," Chu noted. "But now we're expanding our use cases to digital-first patient communications, courses and classes, wellness centers, clinical research, even spiritual health. The types of use cases that we are adding today would never have been possible prior to Praia Health."

RESULTS

By transitioning logged-in digital experiences to the Praia Health platform, Providence has changed the economics of delivering highly customized, individualized systems to patients.

"Prior to Praia, our development team was able to deliver maybe two or three significant new personalized features through the application," Chu recalled. "This year we are delivering more than 40. This new scalability is possible because the Praia Health Consumer Platform does the 'heavy lifting' associated with creating new features and capabilities within our logged-in experiences.

"Praia Health enables low-code integration with the EHR with more security and streamlines the integration with the digital experience through the platform's identity and personalization services," he continued. "In addition, every individual use case we've implemented is showing clear, positive results as well."

ADVICE FOR OTHERS

Health systems are basically at an inflection point – the trusted connection between the health system and health consumers is at its most vulnerable in an increasingly competitive, distributed and decentralized environment, Chu said.

"Health systems must take a page from the book of other consumer-facing industries to enable a digital flywheel that fuels operational transformation and business model expansion," he advised. "Digital transformation is now a health system imperative for both our patients and our caregivers."

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