Providence’s Digital Innovation Group announced a new platform to help hospitals sustain relationships with patients, part of the Seattle health system’s growing portfolio of healthcare-focused tech companies.
Praia Health aims to “remove barriers to patient care” by customizing health journeys and connecting them to suitable services, products, and resources.
Praia’s flagship product is its Health Identity and Engagement Platform. It offers four main components: patient profiling, consumer experience products, healthcare systems integration tools, and analytics. The goal is to create patient profiles that go beyond just clinical records, helping hospitals offer more specialized care throughout health journeys.
Providence said Praia’s platform launched internally in the beginning of 2022, supporting more than 3 million user accounts. The Renton, Wash.-based health system has more than 50 hospitals and hundreds of clinics.
The startup is led by executive-in-residence Justin Dearborn, who previously held CEO roles at PatientBond, Tribune Publishing Company, and Merge Healthcare.
In a Providence blog post, Dearborn said: “Health Systems have been hampered in their ability to digitally connect with customers in a meaningful way because the technical environment they operate within is clinically-oriented, resource-intensive and change resistant.”
The idea with Praia is to help healthcare companies adopt a digital flywheel, a method traditionally used by finance, retail, and ecommerce to retain customers through a platform that offers various benefits.
Since launching in 2014, Providence’s Digital Innovation Group has spun out companies including Xealth, a digital platform that collates services from multiple vendors; DexCare, which manages health system capacity and appointments and recently raised $75 million; and Circle, a women’s health app that was acquired by Wildflower Health in 2018.
The in-house technology incubator is led by Providence Chief Digital Officer Sara Vaezy, who was appointed to the role last year.
Related: Q&A with Providence’s new digital chief on spinning out startups and the future of health tech
