How Providence Created a Unified and Deliberate Digital Strategy

Providence is on a journey to become a health care company rather than a health care delivery organization. As part of this journey, they’ve made significant investments in innovation, including the creation of the Providence Digital Innovation Group. The group was established in 2014 by the new CDO.

The CDO, who has an e-commerce background, structured the digital innovation group to mimic the hyper-focus on consumers found in other sectors but uncommon in health care. At Providence, they believe that health care will increasingly organize itself around products consumers want with technology as the enabler. Organizationally, the digital innovation group reflects this concept and is oriented around creating products to support consumers from the discovery of the health system to the delivery of care.

This group was formed incrementally over a number of years rather than all at once. Today, there are approximately 200 people in the digital innovation group split across five teams, all rolling up to the CDO.

When the digital innovation group was first formed, they were focused on making Providence a more discoverable health system to attract new consumers and improve conversion rates. Today, they take a consumer-focused lens to solve problems across the entire patient care journey.

Their goals are distinct from the legacy IT organization, which is primarily focused on business intelligence and the intake, integration, and maintenance of all core platforms and applications. Conversely, the digital innovation group is focused on how technology can grow the business. They established three specific and measurable objectives that guide their work.

Three objectives of the digital innovation group

1. Driving growth among patients and customers
2. Conversion from offline to online
3. Engagement between episodes of care online

These objectives focus and inform most of the group’s strategy and work, but they also consider other unique opportunities for digital outside the buckets of growth, transactions, and engagement. They believe that digital can be used to tackle many problems—even those that don’t have an obvious digital solution. To help understand these problems at large, the digital innovation group consistently conducts new research.

The digital innovation group conducts comprehensive primary and secondary research to identify prevalent problems and novel opportunities for digital. They take an intentionally broad approach to problem identification understanding that digital can be leveraged as a tool to address a wide array of problems.

Last year, they conducted several hundred interviews with people at all levels of the organization, from frontline staff to the senior management team. Internal input comes from many departments, including the different lines of business, home and community care, and the physician enterprise. External interviews are also conducted with industry leaders and executives. This comprehensive research is then synthesized to form their digital strategy.

But their digital strategy is not set in stone—research is continuously conducted to refine and refresh the digital strategy. For example, they conducted 125 more interviews when Covid-19 started, including around 80 internal interviews and external interviews with former CEOs and CMS1. This approach allows them to align their strategy and priorities with the dynamic market.

Providence’s innovation model drives the work for the digital innovation team. All the problems they identify through their ongoing research are vetted through the same process. First, problems are categorized into four broad digital innovation domains that are derived from Providence’s strategic priorities. For example, one digital domain is about patient access and convenience. Problems related to how patients find the health system and affordability fall under this domain.

The domains are then disaggregated into smaller, well-defined problem statements. Problem statements are stack ranked according to their relative importance to the health system. Prioritization is an iterative process involving input from leadership and employees during interviews. Once they settle on a problem list, they start at the top and assess how they might go about solving each problem with a digital component or solution.

During this analysis step, they consider whether there is already a solution to the problem in the market, either through a digital asset they own such as their EHR1 or through a new vendor partner. If no solution exists and there is enough white space in the market, they will seek to build internally or through a partnership.

Although they have a product development team of around 100 developers, they have a high bar for building products. When they decide to build a product, the end goal is always to commercialize the product by launching a new business. They want to ensure that their team can continue to focus on developing solutions to address problems rather than maintaining existing products.

The innovation model has two important outcomes for Providence. First, it centrally governs digital work to ensure that all projects align with the organization’s strategic objectives. Second, it positions Providence as a digital innovator in the industry because they sell internal innovations to organizations experiencing the same problems.