We caught up with Andy Chu, SVP of Product and Technology at Providence Digital Innovation Group, to learn how he and his team ship scalable digital health solutions from within a major health system. With experience spanning startups to e-commerce giants, Andy brings valuable (and unique) perspective on legacy modernization and consumer-centric thinking.
Andy Chu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andylchu/
Chris Hoyd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishoyd/
For the full YouTube video: https://youtu.be/zqFAi4RVqLg
Chris Hoyd
Welcome back to Product in Healthtech, a community for product leaders by product leaders in health care. I'm Chris Hoyd, a Principal at Vynyl, which is a product development strategy firm. Today, I got to sit down with Andy Chu, the SVP of Product and Technology at the Providence Health System. And his team has been uniquely successful at shipping innovative, scalable solutions in recent years. So I loved hearing about his approach to prioritizing opportunities avoiding too much process and measuring success. So let's jump into that conversation. Andy, super excited to have you on the podcast today. I think you're leading one of the most interesting departments in health tech, especially within a healthcare system. So really excited to learn more about your background, how you approach, you know, leadership with your team. Andy maybe we can start by you just taking a second and talking us through kind of the story of your career a little bit. I know, You've touched on, you know, different industries, and you're relatively maybe recent to healthcare, some, maybe just talk us through the journey for you.
Andy Chu
Thanks Chris. Well, happy to be here. Before Providence, I worked at two different startups, over about seven year timeframe. The last startup did fairly well, hyper growth over 300% revenue, when I've left a little over $300 million in top line. And then before that, I did Ecommerce. And then And then before that, I spent 12 years at Microsoft, six years in the consumer space six years in the enterprise space. And then I started my career in telecom from building network. That was my that was my degree, signal processing, electrical engineering, and all the way now I'm doing doing healthcare, so very different background, very different industries.
Chris Hoyd
That is kind of unique, I think, from sort of deep technical infrastructure to a rapidly scaling startup. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, maybe what you bring from some of those experiences to healthcare, what feels like a, you know, sort of analogous and useful, you know, sort of learning or experience that you've gotten?
Unknown Speaker
You know, when I started in telecom, one telecom is also very highly regulated. Tons of legacy infrastructure. So if you go back to the Unix days, I'm really dating myself. That's what you know, how the operating system was built for. Right? I had to deal with like mainframe infrastructure and everything else. So and if you look at the telecom world, there's also legacy billing system, provisioning systems, those system had been around for 20-30 years. Nobody wants to touch those. And then if you go to retail, similar, right, very legacy infrastructure, very different way of thinking. But I went through the whole transition of when Big Box retailer were dominant in the malls and strip malls to evolving and the evolution of the online shopping, right and on e-commerce. Now, if you look at healthcare, it's going through a very similar transition. Healthcare, you have legacy infrastructure, predominantly, really owned by the electronic medical records, right. And you have brick and mortar, big hospitals and clinics, right? There's a lot of discussions in healthcare around digital transformation, similar conversation, back in telecom days, what happened to retail, so I can definitely see there are a lot of parallels. A big part of it, if you start thinking about all these different industries, now, all these industries still there, telecom is not going away. Retail is not going away. The evolution of it - it has been and that's also how I see healthcare is the same way, right? Over us are patients, we want to consume our healthcare on our own terms. And that's exactly happened to retail, a lot of big retail big box retailer back in the day like 'oh ecommerce is a fad', right? Those companies that definitely have died out, but the ones that actually bet on technologies. If you look at Walmart, right, what they have done, Target right. They're really transforming that patient or the consumer experience and exactly what's happening in healthcare right now. You have the big tech, you have traditional big retailers now coming into healthcare, nibbling at the edges, dealing with inventory type of services, low acuity services, you have venture capitalist private equities, and payers, also going after ambulatory surgical services, right? Typically, those are very high margin. And then for hospitals, we're sort of getting squeezed. So in many ways, if you look at, again, kind of looking at the analagies of retail, or hospitality, and all these other industries, I think, you know, digital plays a huge role, and how we should be thinking about more product thinking, rather than project thinking is, is very important to how we should be approaching problems here in healthcare.
Chris Hoyd
I love that. And I think that's a, you know, relatively rare insight for a lot of healthcare leaders. Maybe Andy, we can take a minute here, and you can just sort of give us the lay of the land for what you and your team does within Providence.
Unknown Speaker
So our team, essentially, we sit outside of IT sits outside of operations, I'd report to the chief digital and Strategy Officer here at Providence, and she reports to our CEO. And our mandate essentially, is trying to figure it out, trying to identify whitespace, within within healthcare. And there are a lot of challenges in healthcare, as we know. The big question is, historically, with a lot of point solutions that us as a health system have deployed. The question is, all these point solution that we have developed, was still causing a lot of problems - right - a workflow, still extremely complex, the application or front end caregivers, right, or clinician or utilizing is still very clunky, still do a lot of costs. So my team's focus is trying to figure it out, both from a patient standpoint, as well as our caregivers standpoint, where we can disrupt. Not for the sake of just disruption, right, but it's actually what we can do to build product that actually improve the patient experience, actually help augment our caregivers workflow, so they can be more efficient. And those are the things that we look at, within the larger health care system. And then that also spans to how we should be working with other partners. Because over the last 10 plus years, there a lot investment in health tech. Question is we're not going to be able to work with and work on every single problem. The question is, how do we bring some of these things into the fold, and actually provide a better experience. But the main mandate of my team is to figure it out, you know, where the whitespace where should we invest? And then if we identify a whitespace is it a point problem, or is actually more global problem? And if it's a global problem, we want to approach the product more at the platform level so we can solve multiple use cases that can you can drive adoption enterprise wide. And if we can successfully build a product and scale it here at Providence, then we commercialize it. And that's when we bring on the management team, and we raise money, and we spin them out. So we've done this three times. And then we just announced Praia Health, which is a fourth company back in October. So we're in the process of the funding stage. And the goal is to spin that company out within the next few months.
Chris Hoyd
incredibly cool. Okay, so I'm gonna dive into a few things there. I think, you know, almost everything you just mentioned is a lot easier said than done. And I think, you other health systems I know, look to, you know, to your team, and to Providence for kind of an example of being able to do that and to, you know, to find a single opportunity to scale, let alone multiple, I'm curious. How would you think about sort of, you know, your teams or Providence as a whole, what's your sort of superpower or unfair advantage that allows you to continuously kind of thread the needle to those scalable opportunities?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I think we're fortunate that Providence at the leadership team level, people are wanting to push the envelope and wanting to go explore the uncharted territories. At the end of the day, we want to disrupt ourselves first, right? I think I give a lot of credit to the sea level here at Providence that enables us to do what we want we can do. I think second, I think our superpower is our ability to connect the dots, right? Because a lot of us come from outside of healthcare. So we don't have, I don't want to come across as negative, like the traditional baggage of healthcare, right? Because you've seen it, you've tried it, you've done it 10 different times, but it hasn't worked. Sometimes, you know, have a little bit of fresh perspective, although you might be looking at the same problem that maybe a slightly different angle, or there's a new technology, right, that actually can empower us to do certain things that you can't do 5-10 years ago. I think the other I would say competitive advantage is that we have access to our own data, to workflow, to clinicians, to MA's, and nurses, right. As a startup, trying to build something like that outside of healthcare is very, very difficult, just in getting access to people to talk to. My team spent a lot of time talking to not only patients, right, but also to all the other folks I just mentioned, like, we'll shadow them for hours, right, trying to understand exactly how they're doing things. And then connect the dots, right between what we're seeing from patients and what we're seeing our internal workflow. And then we can starting to decide, hey, what actually makes sense. And then from there, we can actually get validation, before we build anything, we actually can actually go spend time with our, with our operations team and with our clinician actually validate the problem that we're trying to solve. Right? That's also very hard. If you're trying to build a startup outside of healthcare, you may have a hypothesis. But how can you get feedback really quickly before you iterate? Right, I mean, we have that advantage. So I think that gives us that competitive edge, that, you know, it's just very difficult to do if you're not in a healthcare setting.
Chris Hoyd
That, you know, sort of innate capability, that innate access, combined with - it sounds like from sort of the top down - a certain acceptance of, you know, risk for, for pushing the envelope a little bit. That sounds like a pretty rare combination. I mean, you know, I think it makes sense, but it can be hard to find those things. So it's really cool. So I'm curious now, if we can talk a little bit about how your department is structured, how your team is structured, is it? You know, is it is it sort of separate to the the Providence Hospital Systems team of, you know, technologists and product managers? Who's on your team?
Andy Chu
Yeah. So I have what you would expect from a from a product development organization, I have product managers, I have designers, I have a researcher, developers, data scientist, so it's really full stack end to end. So we're completely separate from the rest of the operations and our IT organization. We can access to those resources, we do brainstorming, we bounce off ideas. So yeah, so in general, we're self contained. That also gives us the flexibility, right also gives us the ability to question how certain things and why certain things were done, and can look at the problem upside down, so to speak. And also give us the flexibility not being bogged down day to day around certain workflow, certain technologies. Now, we also are very mindful around if you're going to go in, build a solution, changing people's workflow, most of the time it's not going to work. But the ability just understand those right there dependencies, and what are the big rock right, and trying to identify those upfront before you do product development - Again, back to your last question that also gives us the competitive advantage. The back to destructure conversation is we're really kind of standalone.
Chris Hoyd
You mentioned your team's most recent launch. I'm curious if you can give us just kind of an overview of you know, if you want to focus on that one or maybe a couple of the other launches in recent years. So, I know they're, they're pretty different, but they seem to be tackling a pretty unique problem space. And, and so yeah, I'm curious, you know, what you've focused on and kind of how they're doing now.
Andy Chu
Yeah, so I'll just talk really briefly if the four companies that well, not for companies so we've launched Wildflower, which is we actually develop certain IP in my group. And then we actually sold the assets to Wildflower and that's specifically focusing on women's health. And then we also have started Zealth, which is a all also prescribe platform offering for clinician to offering services to patients. And then, two years ago, we spun out DexCare, which is more about supply, optimization and personalization for matching demand and supply. And then Praia Health, which is the one we just announced a month ago, and I'll spend more time talking about Praia. Praia, the problem space that we're trying to solve for is around digital engagement. Right. So we we talked about earlier, if you look at retail, hospitality, you know, and in dining, Starbucks, like we all live in Seattle. Every industry, to certain extent, there is some level of personalization. And that's one. Two, I think, now we live in the world consumer are expecting to receive their services, their care, on their own terms. To date, is very difficult, historically is very difficult, because most hospital system that utilize My Chart, which is a uses a product from from Epic, this is not as flexible as as we want to be. And then second, from a provenance standpoint, if you're large health system, you're in a very competitive market, you also want to differentiate your digital experiences in addition to the good quality care that we can provide, those things go hand in hand, right? If you are just a My Chart patient, every other hospital uses My Chart as well, right? You can't really differentiate your digital experience. So so that's the problem that we're trying to solve for it. How do we provide a unique differentiated digital experiences, and then to complement the world class care that we can provide to our patients and our community. So when we start looking at this problem, where you can't really do personalization, if you don't know the identity of that consumer and patient. So that's the first problem that we solve for. So now, at Providence, the ID that when you sign up is a Providence ID. And then we single sign on for the patient into My Chart. Now that this gives us the flexibility to bring other assets that we have, we may have specific content, we may have classes, we may have different modality of care, from urgent to virtual to other retail modality that we can offer you as a patient. So when you log in, we want to provide this rich set of experiences targeting to you specifically. And then furthermore, based on clinical workflow that resides in Epic, which is our EHR. There might be specific flags, right? That, you know, I haven't done my annual wellness, or, Hey, based on my age, and my condition, I might need some additional screening. And there's a new procedure, or screening methods as targeting specific for me. So all these things now I can present to you as a patient, so on a one to one basis, right. So that's the level of experiences that we want to elevate in healthcare, that I think most of us consumers that we're used to when we ordering food and watching videos, that we can't really do that in healthcare. So that's exactly why we build Praia. And to make that actually a reality, when patients and consumers are consuming health care.
I don't think I've heard too much, you know, sort of out in the market about solutions like that, that are sort of a personalized, you know, kind of front door to and around My Chart. Was that a difficult technical challenge or sort of more of a difficult operational challenge to build that and scale it? How hard is that to build?
It is quite difficult. When I talk about single sign on everyone's like 'what are you guys working on single sign on? That's a soft problem'. I'm like, yeah, it's a soft problem except in healthcare. So it's quite difficult because Epic in My Chart is not really built for truly into with other applications, right. So we have to figure that out. We also have a fairly large health system, right? Crossing seven different states we have patient that can go between states, right? If you're in eastern Washington, you might go to the ER, in, you know, Montana, right, and vice versa, your record can be duplicated, you might be in a clinic, you want to update certain demographics information, or you call into the call center, you want to reset your password. Like, there are all kinds of use scenarios, the edge cases are the ones that took us forever, right? To really resolve because ultimately, the clinical record is still sits in Epic, right? That is the system of record does not can be it will change, and will never change that. So that's what I mean earlier, like understanding that, is fairly important, because you need to figure it out which battle you want to pick. And then sort of we work sort of start working backwards. So the identity portion of it took a long time. And because when we build products, we're not only building for Providence, but we also have to build an infrastructure that we know that we can commercialize. So that adds another layer of dimensionality of difficulties. So that took that took a while. And then the personalization aspect of it, we also took a very different approach than some of the companies that are in this space. Rather than trying to come up with different care journey and care pathways, we're taking the approach of, we actually, there's a concept within within Praia, where we call a 'person store', the idea is, is a low latency state engine, where we can allowing third party application to dump data into the 'person store'. And then that those data elements can be consumed by other applications. Now, the whole hypothesis there is that in a health care system, like ours, we may already have different applications and services that offer different digital pathways or health care pathways. So rather than trying to cook up every single one of them, the idea is letting those application to tie their data into his person's identity. And then for the application to render in real time, if I need to receive diabetes care, or you know, I'm on cancer pathway, right, and those services would actually show up. And then I, as a patient, would ultimately may use a different application, right, and those application can be single sign on through our single sign on service. But then the data can also be shared. So it's a very different approach. How we are we thinking about this whole problem, visa vie, some of the other applications that we have seen, which is essentially trying to own everything. So we didn't take that approach. We're taking a more app ecosystem approach,
Chris Hoyd
Just to - I don't want to get too in the weeds - but I think it's a fascinating solution. So I'm curious, you know, as you were launching sort of prioritizing things during the launch, did you wait until you had many of those edge cases figured out? Or did you sort of, you know, tackle the kind of more easily addressable big market stuff, get it out in the in the, you know, in the wild, little bit, and then sort of launch incrementally from there into the edgecases?
Andy Chu
Yeah, the identity piece, we sort of have to solve it, we have to solve the whole thing. That's why it took a while. It was a big bang approach. We have to migrate it overnight - over weekend. So in Providence, we didn't three and a half million digital ID, right? Or My Chart patients. So we have to migrate it overnight, three and a half million. And so as you can imagine, that's that was a little scary. We didn't generate a lot of calls into the call center, which was which was good. And that happened, you know, at this point, you know, year and a half ago. And once that is done, some of the other infrastructure stuff that we have built, we've started doing more incrementally. As of this year, we have been really focusing on And what we call the next best action. And those other ones that essentially we can go into the EHR, or go to other places, we can actually start showing next best action card to our patient, based on these third party data, you know, elements and attributes, we can start showing these cards. So an example with that would be like mammography, if someone has lapsed for their mammography. Now, when a patient logs in, they will see a mammography card, you can click on that card, it goes into appointment booking flow, and you can book it like right in the app. Right, very seamlessly. So and then we're now going down the path, essentially, we've been calling it digitizing these different endpoints. So the idea is, you know, as a hospital with 51-52 hospitals, you know, close to 1000 clinics, they may have different programs, different protocols. There's no way we can design a system to accommodate all these things. Really, the question is, if we can digitizing some of these endpoints, and then letting the operators to select, okay, hey, this program is targeting people, you know, between 50 and 60, you know, these conditions, and then these cards would automatically show up, right? When these patient kind of logged in, they wouldn't, they would see what they should be seeing.
Chris Hoyd
Really cool. Okay, so I'm curious how you're how you're measuring success of it. Now. Are you looking at engagement? Are you looking at growth? Are you looking at patient outcomes?
Andy Chu
Yeah, patient outcome is harder, right, because that's going to be taking a longer, we need to collect a lot more data. And then we actually need to do it good, because study on it. But right now we're looking at around engaged monthly active user now. So that's one of the key metrics that we're looking at. We're also looking at, because one of the things that we also handled is all the login. And if you have brand new patient or consumer converting to a patient, we're also looking at the signup flow. We're also essentially will look at, you know, that barrier of entry. Before we know, hey, with my charge, a certain percentage of people can't sign in for a number of reasons, right. So we have seen that number, those percentage essentially gone down like dramatically. We also look at the volume of problems, people calling to the call center as we grow our digital engage users. And then the the other thing I talked about is monthly active user. And then last couple of things we also started tracking is how people are consuming and clicking through these MDA cards. And then appointment books is another thing that we also tracked.
Chris Hoyd
So this has spun out, it's now you know, you're attempting to commercialize it, scale it. How does that team stay sort of connected to your team? Or does it not necessarily can go kind of live on its own and try to raise money and you know, is there like a entrepreneur in residence that leads it?
Andy Chu
So we just hired a CEO back in back in August. Justin Dearborn, longtime entrepreneur in the in the healthcare space, he has come on board back in August. So his full time job is go raise money and close deals. That's what he's actually working on. So once the company spins out, hopefully, you know, within the next few months, we're going through we're working through a transition process, where the folks that on my team that work on the product, they have a choice to go to a new company, right. So they would leave Providence Digital Innovation Group and joining Praya, officially as a as a you know, as a startup is sort of their their choice. And then the crappy part for my team is we have to we hire that that's, you know, that's part of the process. And then we also have been looking at, you know, whether the problems that we want to go solve for, and we started that process about six months ago.
Chris Hoyd
That sounds like one of the sort of least territorial approaches to, you know, personnel and talent and resources that that I've heard of in a large healthcare organization, which I think speaks to what you were saying earlier about the culture as it comes down from the C suite. And you know, you guys just like to ship stuff that is effective. It's really cool.
Andy Chu
Yeah, I think I think part of the way how we think about this, yes, we want to benefit Providence, but a lot of things that we are shipping we also want to benefit to other health systems, because when we want to attack a problem we want to make sure is a big enough of a problem that other health system also has challenges, right? Because it's very hard as you know, is is expensive. to build and maintain a product, right? So yes, we build it, we solve the, you know, the challenges that we see for Providence, but then the continue development and maintenance of it, that's when we let the capital market to decide, right? And then that that's what we spin out, then we become actually a customer, of Praia. Also the approach how we think about personalities is exact same way, that's also been able to, you know, attract the right talent to come to come to the group, is for people have the opportunity to actually, you know, work in health care. Because at the end of the day, Providence is a very mission driven organization, my sales pitch is, hey, is great, you know, you might be a Facebook or a Meta, or Amazon, Microsoft, but if you want to do a, you know, do a round in healthcare, this is a great place to be. Because we can use to talent, and then it's up to the individual, if they're super passionate of the product they have been working on, they can go with a company, or they can stay work on the next thing.
Chris Hoyd
So you mentioned a couple minutes ago, sort of in the wake of Praia launching, and, you know, finding a CEO, you and your team have, you know, maybe six months ago or so, started the process of identifying, you know, the sort of next best opportunity, and I know, it sounds like you guys, maybe are not the most process oriented, you've got a great culture of communication, and comfort with sort of risk and the trade offs of innovation and all that stuff. But, but I do know that, you know, for a lot of Vynyl's clients, people I've worked with, process top of mind, it's, it's one of the, you know, one of the main priorities, and it's what they hear from their bosses is - they got to have the best process, right? And so I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about if you have something very structured or if it's not quite like that, or just what what is the process?
Andy Chu
Yeah, for innovation we don't have that much process. One, I think I'm not a big process person in general. I mean, on the clinical operation side, we have a lot of process for good reasons, right? Because we're taking care of patients and those things, you have to check the box. And it's super important. But the stuff that we do, is is a bit random walk, right? I mean, we have general framework, in terms of how we think about the approach to problem. I mean, we do the market scan, we talked to a lot of customers. And when I say customer, there's both patients, internal, as well as external patients, as well as internal stakeholders - the operators, caregivers. And then also look at our specific business metrics, because ultimately, a lot of the products that we build is a B2B2C product. So my customers are the operators are the clinicians, right, they have to sign off and buy in to the things that we're developing. So we have like, general framework in terms of collecting the feedback, trying to identify the areas that we want to work in. And then after that is just a vetting process. It's a lot of dialogue, a lot of conversation. It's continued vetting, and that's what I mean by a little bit of random walk. And before we get to decide to start working on some prototype, right, and then, as part of this process, which we've been working on over the last six, seven months, now we have identify, you know, a handful of themes that we want to focus on. And then based on those themes, we're continuing doing validation, right, both internally and externally. And then from there, then we can start working on, you know, building some, I would say, design prototype, right? And that's when we start looking at additional validation from our key stakeholders. And then from there, we can start decide, okay, what are software gonna start building? Right? So that's sort of our framework. You can call it a process, but it's really a framework. And everything else is it's not a straight line.
Chris Hoyd
Right, right. Right. You know, I think it's very common for healthcare executives to to have the talking point of like, we're going to meet the patient where they are, we're going to understand very deeply the patient pain points, but it sounds like you not only take it sort of one step further than that, you talk to caregivers and providers, and they get very close to their issues and the operators - but you mentioned earlier that you also look at sort of changes in, you know, out in the world of technology, new paradigms. So what might be sort of newly capable based on those late breaking sort of changes? So I'm curious if you know, with LLMs, and AI, and sort of that being the theme of the new paradigm, and the last call it 12 months or so, are you guys looking at that yet? Or is that, you know, down the road?
Andy Chu
Absolutely, we actually have GPT4 working in production. I think we probably a handful, if not, you know, a very few healthcare system actually have a model is actually working in production. So one of the area kind of, because I actually like to talk about the problems, because, like, sort of my mandate to the team is like, really immerse ourselves into people's problem. Because the more we actually understand where they're coming from, understand their workflow, the better solution we can provide. So one of the issues in healthcare that face like every healthcare person face, across the US is in basket messaging, essentially, for those of you not familiar, is patients sending messages to, to their doctors. Especially the last couple of years to three years during the pandemic, those volume messages is exponentially have grown. And there are a lot of analysis been done essentially saying, hey, that these going to continue to grow at exponential rate. So when we started looking at this problem over a year ago, we said, hey, we can we can figure it out what we can do, right? So we went in deep dive, grab back to the data point, we have access to data, and start categorizing a lot of these messages. And we know a big chunk of these messages are not specific clinical related, right? So we said, hey, we can we have a chat bot? Let's figure it out what we can do to solve that problem. So essentially, now we build a solution that lives actually on My Chart on My Chart Web, and there's also part of the Providence app. When the patient wants to send a message, we'll detect those. And we'll tell the patient Hey, you're asking for a billing question. Go here. You have a medication with no problem, we can help you with that, or you we just shipped a referral last week - hey, here's a you know, here's what you need to know about referral. Right? So essentially trying to reduce the number of messages being sent back and forth between the patient and the in the office, or have the patient not send the message at all. So we're seeing depends on the modality which form of interaction between the patient and our system, we're seeing anywhere from 24 to 30% reduction in messages, from people not sending a message. So yeah, so that's, and and before a year ago, we're using, you know, old model, right, so fast forward a year, we have now using you know, some of the large language model. And, and we also reboot our entire operational processes, and thinking also very deeply around the privacy, equity, transparency aspect of LLM as well. So there's a whole thing that we're currently actively working on. So. So that's just an example of how new technology development looking at a problem space. And then we say, hey, by bringing some of these pieces together, what problem can we solve and solve even better?
Chris Hoyd
Really cool. Do you think that's a candidate maybe for a future sort of spin off? Or does that feel like an internal solution?
Andy Chu
I think there's still quite a bit of work that we need to go do. We are also partnering with our informatics team, I think is good to self direct, right that letting the patient getting information. But I think we can do more even for clinicians. Say for example, now you have clinical questions related to, say, back pain. A specific office may have different protocols. So we can use some of these new techniques in LLM and other things, actually helping the the MA's, or physician assistant to craft these messages without having done spent two minutes, three minutes, five minutes, right? Because every 10 seconds, 30 seconds, when you added up 1000s of messages. It's a lot of time. So if we can save those is actually really good. So so we're looking at more of an end to end solution right now. But predominantly right now focusing on Providence and I'm very hopeful that the solution that we can come up with is going to be able to scale.
Chris Hoyd
Just to another question just occurred to me sort of back on to your, your team, your department, it sounds like much of what the team does is kind of product discovery, right, which makes sense and sort of maybe zero to one, you know, validation and development. So, you know, that's ambiguous stuff. Right? That's, that's, that's tricky stuff to do. I'm curious how you measure your team's success, you know, over the course of maybe a year, like, how do you think about that?
Andy Chu
Yeah, that's, that's a great question. So we're getting going to 24. And I'm in the process of thinking about the exact same exact same thing, I think there are a few things for the known product that that we have been working on is, is fairly straightforward. There's specific business metrics that we need to go ahead, like, for example, Praia, you know, going into coming into 23, we have a monthly active user target that we want to go achieve. So that was a mandate for for the entire team. In addition, there are some specific features that we know we wanted to go go hit this year. So those are the ones that been highlighted. And then for the engineering team, there are over the last couple of years, we actually had been retrofitting our entire infrastructure as well. Because before every team kind of, it's like a startup, right? Like, I have like five different startups in the work, and then every team, every dev want to kind of using their own tools, their infrastructure, which is, you know, is good now as they're building it, but it's, when you're trying to spin out a company, then, you know, you can spend 6-9 months to retrofit your entire infrastructure. Right. So So one of the things that we have been doing the last couple of years is mandating certain infrastructure requirements. So that was like a goal for the entire team. So for some of the newer unknown one, that the goal is going to be a little bit more loose, you may have a pilot, some sort, we may have, you know, to have some kind of key milestone around, again, certain software we want to go build. So that would be like, one of the goals for the for the team, we don't have a mandate. I don't really like to call my team an incubator, like, we don't have a mandate for certain incubator, like, hey, you know, we're going to ship 100 companies in, you know, three years, right? We don't really have that mandate, because a lot of it is for us to go invest. And it often takes time, right to actually really dive into deep into the problems, before you can really set a goal. So yeah, so there is there is a percentage, that again, depends on the lifecycle of a product, certain team's goal is going to be a little bit more loose is more of an R&D phase. And then once you once we get a little bit momentum, then that's when we start putting on more fire. And those goals will be more strict.
Chris Hoyd
Okay, really cool. So, very contextual, you're always kind of, tracking what's happening, and what's the sort of next best available, metric to hold yourself accountable. accountable to that's really cool. Okay, maybe just one or two more questions here. Thanks for all your time today. You guys have this sort of, from my perspective, a unique combination of, of a healthy culture, you know, technical and sort of product talent. And, the scale of Providence and sort of your structure within it, I think is, is effective as well. So you guys have racked up some, you know, some wins, right, some some good traction, I think on some of these, can you maybe talk a little bit about something a little bit less successful, maybe you guys have invested in in a prototype for maybe longer than you wish you would have and it just didn't quite get the traction or you know, if there's anything along those lines.
Andy Chu
Yeah. I'm going to answer this question is like, you know, someone has interview question, you say, Hey, what's your weakness, and they turn into your strength, kind of response. It's gonna sound like this, but didn't mean to, like when we started out Praia, this is about 15-16 months ago, we tried to figure it out around the personalization stuff that I talked about earlier. So we have, you know, engineering director and another person on the team start working on this problem. And initially, we're like, hey, why don't we just start personalizing content? That should be easy. So we started digging into it for a number of reasons, the content management system that that Province were utilizing at the time wasn't as robust as we were like, right? So after essentially four or five weeks working on the problem and chase down the right people, right, were like, okay, this is not workable. So we pivoted. And we're like, okay, hey, what about, What if we can get access to the medical record? And just start with like, care gap, right? What can we do with that information? And can we just start 'personalizing it'? And what kind of structure like from an architecture standpoint, we should be thinking about? If we were incorporating other third party data sources? How do we actually render some of these things in our front end? So that turns into the person store that I talked about, and then now is a core component on in CIDP, are now Praia. So this a sort of failure? But at the same time, we're like, okay, which is asked, go to the next question, what do we learn? And what else can we do? I think the ability for us to connect with other teams was also advantage, because it just happened, you know, the engineering manager was talking to our someone within our IS team, there, were saying, Oh, we you get to we're exposing these data elements that you can consume, you can do something with it. We're like, okay, let's take a look. Right, I think it's those connective tissues and the ability to have these sort of speak water cooler conversation, that help us explore new avenue.
Chris Hoyd
I guess, last one here, any, you know, for all the, you know, CEOs, CIOs, VPs of product and other other health systems out there. Do you have any advice for for them on how to, you know, move the needle as effectively as possible at innovation?
Andy Chu
Yeah, I think the big question, I think, you know, I talked about earlier, I mean, I give a lot of credit to Rod and the management team, kind of really want to push the envelope. I think it's really important to understand that the state of the healthcare business is it's tough environment right now. Yet, there is still very much wanting to invest in innovation, because we all know, you can't just cut to cut and then to a growth path. So I think one realizing what you want to do, actually, innovation is really key. Because when we are innovating, we're not just for the sake of purely just starting company, right? We're innovating for Providence first, and then understanding the problem. So there's a direct metrics on what we do to like a business goal. So actually having that those honest conversation, I think it's important, I think, second, is that look at your existing resources, right? Because not a lot of us came from a healthcare background. We're not healthcare IT guys, most of us are tech people, or product design folks come from outside of healthcare. I think that the question is, if you do want to innovate, right? Want to push the envelope? See if you actually have the right people on the team. Because I don't I'm not a big process person believe because I believe you have the right people, you don't need a lot of processes. So especially again, for the stuff that I do not not clinical operations. So I think that's another important factor. Because if you don't have the right people is really difficult to to actually innovate right. In the example that I gave earlier around the engineering director, he just be able to connect the dots. I think the third piece is back to the culture piece. I think, Chris, you have mentioned a few times. I think having an environment and foster the environment of wanting people to take risk, to think differently, is also really key. Right? If people feel comfortable, and they feel comfortable, both questioning the what has been done in the past, questioning their environment and questioning the infrastructure, right? And then they can channel in the right way. Then there's that's that's when the magic happens. So I think I think if I just focus on those would be made sure like the strategies online like aligned, right. And then you have the right people, and then you have setting the right culture for the people to to actually work in that environment. Everything else, people can figure it out.
Chris Hoyd
I love that. That is so good. Well, let's end on that. That's perfect. Andy, I've really loved this conversation, really, you know, happy to learn a bit more about what you're up to. And, frankly, I'm happy that you're working in healthcare. So thank you.
Andy Chu
Thank you so much for having me. It's been fun. Yeah. And, you know, healthcare, we need a lot more tech people wanting to come into health care. So come for those who are listening
Chris Hoyd
agreed.
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