Consumers expect healthcare to deliver the same frictionless, personalized digital experiences they enjoy in other industries. Yet many health systems struggle to move beyond the initial deployment of a digital front door into increasingly complex personalization. With various touch points and point solutions, health systems need to be able to orchestrate interactions across a fragmented ecosystem of web, mobile, chatbot, and patient portal tools for authenticated patients.
As a health system leader, you have likely identified this problem and prioritized solving it as a strategic initiative, but might not know where to start.
Fintech (ex. Stripe), retail (ex. Shopify), and travel (ex. Sabre) went through similar progressions of industry digital transformation where scalable, white-labeled platforms enabled companies to easily manage a branded digital experience.
Until recently, there was not a commercially available consumer experience orchestration solution for healthcare. Several organizations built custom platforms to deliver an enhanced digital experience embedded within their EMR patient portal. Providence also built a similar platform (Praia Health) – and has made it available to other health systems looking to leverage the power of an existing platform.
Most leaders will evaluate software solutions through a build vs. buy analysis. We’ve analyzed the options to help you make the best decision for your health system.
Providence, a leader in digital innovation for health systems, invested years of product and engineering time and resources to create Praia Health – filling a pressing need for scalable healthcare consumer experience orchestration. This solution has been live at Providence since January 2022 and is now commercially available.
Praia Health integrates disparate third party point solutions and ancillary services that don't have a home in the patient portal into a unified web and mobile experience, allowing patients to access their personalized profile with a single set of credentials. It’s an all-in-one solution that increases conversion rates, builds system loyalty, and allows a health system to focus on delivering new functionality to their patients in unprecedented time.
Here’s what it took Providence to build the Praia Health platform:
Some health systems may also consider building their own consumer experience orchestration solution, believing their market or use cases are unique or desiring full control over branding and integration. While these goals are valid, the reality of building in-house often comes with steep costs, unforeseen challenges, and long deployment timelines.
Health systems are not structured like tech companies, making it difficult to recruit and retain the talent needed to build and maintain a complex platform. Security compliance, use case deployments, and integration challenges require continuous oversight, further increasing costs. Building a custom solution diverts valuable resources away from other strategic priorities and delays time to market – leaving your organization at a competitive disadvantage.
If a system like Providence, armed with decades of new product incubation experience, a strong reputation in commercialization, and deep resources, required 4+ years of effort to build Praia Health, ask yourself: is your health system truly prepared to take on such a massive endeavor from scratch?
When you consider everything involved, the opportunity cost of building in-house isn’t worth it – especially when proven solutions are readily available at a fraction of the cost.
To revisit our retail industry comparison: Would you choose to build your own ecommerce website from scratch when you could easily use Shopify for a fraction of the cost and effort? Shopify allows users to focus on the front-end branding and personalization decisions of an online storefront while they take care of the technical back-end.
Praia Health provides the same opportunity for healthcare consumer experience orchestration. Instead of building the back-end infrastructure of a platform from scratch, your health system can adopt Praia's existing foundation and customize it to fit your system's needs. Organizations using Praia Health receive a branded digital platform and have full control over their consumers’ unique experiences.
“With Praia Health we are able to deliver services, programs and resources to individual health consumers at scale. Prior to Praia, we implemented maybe two or three consumer-facing solutions a year. In 2024, we were able to deliver forty—all of which were algorithmically delivered through our logged-in digital experiences to the specific individuals who benefitted.” - Andy Chu, SVP, Product and Technology Incubation, Providence
The healthcare industry is at a crossroads, where digital transformation is no longer optional. The question for healthcare executives isn’t just if they should invest in digital experience orchestration, but how they should go about it.
By choosing Praia Health, you gain the benefits of a proven, scalable platform that is faster, cheaper, and lower risk than building in-house. With Praia as your partner, you can deliver the frictionless, personalized experiences patients expect — while staying focused on what matters most: delivering world-class care.
Don’t let your health system fall behind. Make the wise investment and let Praia unlock your digital transformation.
