Copyright Newsweek
Praia Health’s latest announcements aim to boost patient engagement across health systems by streamlining data and operations and leveraging AI-driven personalization and automation. The digital health system platform on Tuesday released Praia Intelligence, an AI-powered digital personalization engine that combines identify, data and patient engagement workflows into “actionable context.” This allows for more advanced real-time personalization and automation for acquisition, engagement and retention efforts within health systems. This comes one day after Praia partnered with Providence health system and diagnostics company Labcorp to streamline lab bookings. Why It Matters Early developments of Praia Intelligence saw a 15 to 30 percent boost in patient lead conversions; a 10 to 20 percent increase in patient acquisition costs with churn risk alerts, which indicate the likelihood that a customer will stop using the service; and an 8 to 15 percent increase in repeat visits with personalized recommendations and guidance. “Health systems don’t need more isolated tools; they need an intelligent conductor that brings all the pieces into harmony,” said Praia Health CEO Justin Dearborn in a statement. “Praia Intelligence orchestrates data, engagement, and automation in a unified way, so systems can scale personalized experiences without the noise of fragmented point solutions or outreaches.” What To Know Praia spun off from Providence’s Digital Innovation Group nearly two years ago and is focused on helping public hospitals and health systems give patients a smoother, more personalized digital experience, Doug Grapski, vice president of strategy and operations at Praia Health, told Newsweek. "What we're really wanting to do is bring together all of those services that live outside of the [electronic medical records] EMR capabilities, and layer them in with the patient portal," he said. "We're bringing all those different assets together to help health systems ultimately reduce costs, drive loyalty and really just drive that digital transformation." Praia Intelligence promises to organize siloed data into clear and connected systems to help health systems better understand patient needs. Using AI and machine learning, Praia Intelligence can personalize care in real time and automate tasks like patient outreach, predicting future needs and bolstering patient retention, according to the company. It still keeps humans in the loop, allowing hospitals to build and monitor the AI agent. Grapski said Praia Intelligence creates a personalized experience for patients so that when they log into their patient portal, they see only what is relevant to them, like overdue bills, missed vaccinations and lab appointments. Then, Praia uses patient data to "nudge" them by sending notifications to re-engage them with the platform to complete various tasks. He added that the tool is flexible and brings in various partners to integrate with different health systems. Through its partnership with Providence and Labcorp, Praia's digital experiences allow patients to book lab appointments, pay bills, access health records and manage their care in one place. Praia had previously integrated Labcorp's scheduling function directly into its platform, to allow patients to book lab appointments through the health system portal instead of making an account through Labcorp. This not only helped patients complete their labs, but Praia saw that users who came into the portal for labs were staying to complete other tasks, like paying overdue bills or scheduling follow-up visits. "It's hard to get patients to proactively do a lot of that, but when you make it easy for them and give them a platform to do it all in one place, we actually saw that lift," Grapski said. According to Praia, this resulted in an increase in scheduled appointments, a 52 percent increase in lab appointment bookings via digital notifications and a 52 percent increase in patient bill pay engagement. Nearly 40 percent of canceled appointments were rebooked within 30 days and 23 percent of appointments were self-modified or canceled within the app, reducing appointment no-shows. One of the biggest benefits Grapski measures is a decrease in inbound calls to health systems, because the platforms can field questions from patients, lowering both administrative costs and the burden on staff. This improves operational efficiency and boosts quality metrics. Increasing patient engagement also drives more return on investment and fosters more loyalty with the health system. Grapski said Praia found a 67 percent monthly retention rate, which he said is pretty high compared to other health care app experiences. What Happens Next Looking ahead, Providence, Praia Health and Labcorp are exploring ways to expand into areas like genomics, chronic care management, at-home lab collection kits and clinical trial recruitment Grapski said Praia is looking to work with Labcorp and other partners to allow patients to complete tasks at home and order and deliver prescription drugs. Ultimately, Grapski said Praia's goal is to continue to improve nudging capabilities to get more engagement and reduce pain points across healthcare. "If you bring [health care tools] all together and actually systematically engage patients with them, you'll see that lift and more patients will complete other tasks [and] that's really it's really compound," he said. "You get someone to make it easier for you to sign up for the health system, we digitize all those services, all those endpoints, put more of them on there, and then you'll see people looking more and more." Have an announcement or news to share? Contact the Newsweek Health Care team at health.care@newsweek.com.
