Praia Health’s Kurt Hammond on Powering Providence’s Work With Labcorp

Praia Health, a Providence spin-out that describes itself as a “patient experience orchestration platform” for health systems, recently detailed some results of work it has done with Labcorp to improve lab appointment adherence, patient engagement, and operational efficiency at Providence. Healthcare Innovation spoke to Kurt Hammond, Praia’s chief commercial officer, about the work with Labcorp as well as Praia’s plans to address imaging workflows next. 

In making the announcement, Praia said that Providence identified an opportunity to create a more streamlined and supportive lab booking process for patients. Providence connected its Praia Health-powered digital experiences with Labcorp’s patient scheduling and lab ordering systems. The result is that patients can now book lab appointments, pay bills, access health records, and manage their care all in one place, Praia said. Among other things, the company said this led to an 8-fold increase in scheduled appointments and a 52% increase in lab appointment bookings via digital notifications. 

Labcorp and Praia Health anticipate expanding access to other hospitals and health systems across the country.

Healthcare Innovation: Before we talk about this work with Labcorp, let’s remind readers about Praia’s initial incubation and spin-out from Providence.

Hammond: Providence has a digital innovation group that was originally led by Aaron Martin. They were thinking about what problems to solve. One company, DexCare, was focused on physician directory and open scheduling. When you think about the patient experience, like many other health systems, they had a front-end app, but MyChart was only being used for paying a bill or looking at lab results. But it wasn't driving digital transactions for many reasons. How you manage identity was No. 1. Then No. 2, it was about experiences, like how you create these journeys or experiences that are unique to your health system and not commoditized journeys that MyChart provides. And No. 3 is the personalization — where you not only make it a Providence experience, but you make it Kurt Hammonds’ Providence experience, and do it in a way where it's a platform and an infrastructure that can plug in and allow the health system to go create.

Praia CEO Justin Dearborn raised $20 million through four primary investors, and Labcorp was one of those. 

HCI: I read that Indiana's Community Health Network also licensed the platform for implementation last year. Can you talk about any of the ways that they're already starting to use it?

Hammond: Dr. Patrick McGill is now the CEO there. We were in the midst of starting the project in the spring, and he put it on hold. So right now he's asked us to wait until January to pick it back up. 

HCI: The idea is that there might be an ecosystem of digital health apps that as a health system I want to use for a whole bunch of different reasons —  for instance with my diabetic patients, I might have an app, and Praia is going to make it easier for me to seamlessly incorporate that app into my health system through the portal, and personalize the experience for those patients, right?

Hammond: Correct. So if you think about the current process, someone comes up with an idea like a diabetic app, and then they have to go find IT resources and a timeline and a project and a scope, and it could take 12 to 18 months for them to do that, and maybe half a million dollars to deploy. But with Praia at Providence, Labcorp said, ‘Hey, we have a huge volume of patients who have orders from their doctors to get labs at Labcorp. Right now, those lab orders sit on MyChart, but the patient has to make a phone call, take a piece of paper, and figure out on their own how to get that appointment scheduled, and that causes cancelations, no-shows, delays and results in a loss of revenue for Labcorp. So Providence decided it needed to solve this problem. It took us 60 days, about one-third of an IT resource on their side, and now we have a deployed system that's coming out with fantastic results in terms of the conversion. The difference is you're taking many, many months of development time down to weeks to turn on a use case that has significant value.

HCI: If Labcorp was one of the investors, was lab ordering one of the use cases that was identified early on as obviously having friction for the patient, for the health system and for the lab company?

Hammond: When Providence was thinking about this, they asked what are all the digital point solutions that are patient-facing and that require a separate log-in, a separate web page outside the app or web experience. And then what are all the ancillary services that are a part of our network that we want to be frictionless? We don't want them to have to pre-register. And lab is a huge one. Providence has their own labs. They have Labcorp and they have Quest. So Quest will be live, I think, in the first quarter of next year as well. And next is imaging.

HCI: I was just going to ask if imaging ordering and scheduling is another use case for this…

Hammond: It is. We just started that conversation last week. RadNet is the largest private imaging center owner in the country. The first task is to integrate with RadNet. For imaging, you have to do a lot of pre-certification, re-certification or pre-auth processes. You’ve got to get all that data collected up front, and that's already in the Providence app.

HCI: Praia also has announced the launch of a new AI-driven intelligence platform to unify fragmented data. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Hammond: There are two components of it: No. 1, as it does with other point solutions or services, we've become the platform that can drive that patient-facing set of AI tools. We are seeing more agentic AI chatbots that will drive some patient experience. The first aspect is to control and manage any patient-facing AI tools. The other component is that we're using AI to drive deeper personalization and have it be less reliant upon a human to set up that personalization — for example, nudging. If you think about nudging today in healthcare, typically, a patient is getting flooded with SMS messages and e-mails and such through a personalized experience. You can turn those off and just turn on push notifications through the mobile app, but do it in an intelligent way, and maybe you start with a certain type of message, and then it changes the message. It changes the positioning of the message. Maybe the cards are sorted differently in terms of how you message, but it's really focused on amplifying the personalization, but doing it in a way where they're not having to add FTEs.