A tech spinoff will allow Providence to go from building three new app features a year to 40
Providence is a health care system based on Good Morning Bill. In October, it was announced that the Praia Health platform will emerge from Providence after landing its first customer outside of Providence, and that more than a dozen digital health partners will join Praia’s digital ecosystem. Renton, Washington, which operates 52 hospitals and 800 clinics in seven states: Alaska, Montana, Oregon, Washington, California, New Mexico and Texas.
It includes the spin-off Praia Health, which markets a digital health platform. This is the story of Praia Health and its innovative technology.
THE PROBLEM
While it has been a proven strategic approach in other consumer-facing industries, it has been essentially impossible to trigger a ‘digital flywheel’ effect in a healthcare system – largely because of the deep, entrenched and required dependence on health care system from its traditional electronic health record system, said Andy Chu, senior vice president of product and technology innovation at Providence.
“Any digital experience that requires access to a patient’s medical record is severely limited by the legacy architecture and closed system limitations of the EHR,” he explained. “As a result, generic patient portals like MyChart have become the de facto standard for a patient’s digital interaction with their healthcare system – and these experiences are limited to just a patient’s medical interaction.
“Given that 80-90% of health outcomes depend on factors outside the medical environment, this is clearly a problem,” he continued. “To support their communities, healthcare systems have expanded their offerings to include the programs, services and resources that positively impact health outcomes, but it is impossible to include these offerings in the EHR patient portal, and extremely difficult and costly to implement apps tailor-made and maintained that reflect the full breadth of the offering.”
Praia Health is designed to solve these complex barriers to digital transformation.
PROPOSAL
The promise was that Praia Health could create a “digital flywheel” for Providence’s healthcare system, allowing it to transform its web and mobile apps into a new, scalable channel for delivering highly personalized systems, Chu explained.
“The platform is designed to make delivering internal and third-party solutions to consumers practical, scalable and impactful for a healthcare system,” he noted. “Praia Health’s ecosystem capabilities enable healthcare systems to drive awareness and engagement in solutions and reduce acquisition costs.
“We expected the platform to become the foundational technology for the digital transformation of our organization,” he continued. “This allows us to optimize the current patient experience through digital, promote existing programs, expand offerings into new consumer-facing industries, or guide users to self-service support pathways – on a case-by-case basis.”
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 allow patients to access their EHRs, book appointments, pay bills and see recommendations for programs, services and resources that are highly relevant to them.
“The first step in the implementation was a lift and shift to Praia Health’s Secure Patient Identity service, or SPI,” Chu explains. “Post-transition, SPI will transparently support all logged-in digital experiences across the system – including branded mobile and web apps, patient portal apps, and internally created or third-party applications.
“Once our identity was modernized, Praia Health’s PersonStore allowed us to securely combine 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, secure and reflect the full breadth of our healthcare system.”
With Praia Health, the digital flywheel is driven by adding new capabilities and systems to the platform’s ecosystem – and the platform supports the integration of any consumer service, program, system, resource or data source associated with the healthcare system, whether is proprietary or accessible through a third party.
“Our initial use cases focused on closing healthcare gaps, billing and financial support, and navigation to self-service options,” Chu noted. “But now we’re expanding our use cases into digital patient communications, courses and classes, wellness centers, clinical research and even spiritual health care. The types of use cases we’re adding today would never have been possible before 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.
“Before Praia, our development team could deliver maybe two or three key new personalized features through the application,” Chu recalls. “This year we are delivering more than 40. This new scalability is possible because the Praia Health Consumer Platform does the ‘heavy lifting’ of creating new features and capabilities within our logged-in experiences.
“Praia Health enables low-code integration with the EHR with greater security and streamlines integration with the digital experience through the platform’s identity and personalization services,” he continued. “Additionally, each individual use case we’ve implemented also shows clear, positive results.”
ADVICE FOR OTHERS
Healthcare systems are actually at an inflection point: The trusted connection between the healthcare system and healthcare consumers is at its most vulnerable in an increasingly competitive, distributed and decentralized environment, Chu said.
“Healthcare systems should take a page from the book of other consumer-facing industries to enable a digital flywheel that drives operational transformation and business model expansion,” he advised. “Digital transformation is now a necessity for the healthcare system for both our patients and our providers.”
Follow Bill’s HIT coverage on LinkedIn: Bill Siwicki
Email him: bsiwicki@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.