The Praia Health story

Praia Health was born inside Providence to solve a problem every health system faces: disconnected, impersonal digital experiences. Built and proven within one of the nation’s largest health systems, Praia delivers the personalized, frictionless journeys patients expect. What started as an innovation initiative became the first scalable platform for patient experience orchestration.

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Our mission

Praia Health’s mission is to be the industry leader in orchestrating patient experiences, personalizing digital solutions for patients, and driving loyalty and access for health systems.

Our team

The Praia Health team is full of collaborative, visionary leaders working to create a more connected world for healthcare experiences.

Founder & CEO
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Justin Dearborn

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Justin Dearborn

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Justin Dearborn is Founder and CEO of Praia Health, which is revolutionizing the delivery of individualized health solutions at scale, enabling health system transformation through digital. He is a seasoned entrepreneur with a pedigree that ranges from evolving startups to leading public companies, and brings decades of experience to the role crossing health care, enterprise and technology.

Successfully building and scaling companies to the next level has been a theme of Dearborn’s career. As Chief Executive Officer of Merge Healthcare, Dearborn rebuilt an organization on the brink of bankruptcy to a billion-dollar asset that later sold to IBM. While CEO of patient engagement and interaction platform, Patient Bond, he moved the company from an early-stage startup to a global organization that was later acquired by Upfront Healthcare. He started his career at Motorola, and held executive positions at ICM Partners, Tribune Publishing Company, Merrick Ventures and Click Commerce.

Dearborn has a passion for healthcare transformation, building great teams, and creating the deep, trusted relationships required for enterprise software success. He holds a Bachelor of Accounting and a Juris Doctorate.

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Customer Experience
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Grace Feliciano

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Grace Feliciano

Senior Vice President Customer Experience

Grace Feliciano brings over 20 years of leadership experience in healthcare information technology roles spanning global services management, business development, and solution strategy. She is an agile and strategic business leader with proven success driving services delivery at all levels of scale, fostering a high-performance culture based on customer value and accountability, and engaging customers for long term growth by leading high performing teams.

As a member of the leadership team, Feliciano is responsible for leading Praia Health’s implementation services, hosting and support operations, and building a well-focused solution-oriented service strategy and value proposition that exceeds customer expectations.

She has previously led North American client services for Agfa Healthcare, IBM Watson Health Imaging, and Merge Healthcare, providers of cloud-based and on-premise enterprise imaging solutions. Prior to her focus on enterprise imaging solutions, she garnered extensive start-up experience as VP of Partner Development and Integration at eMed, GM of Requisite Technology, and GM of Click Commerce.

Feliciano is passionate about leveraging a proven playbook for people, process, and technology, and developing sustainable processes that scale with the growth of the customer, the team, and the organization. When she’s not in the office, you can see her cheering loud for her kids’ sports and competitive dance teams. She’s also an amateur photographer and enjoys both traditional and digital scrapbooking.

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Strategy & Operations
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Doug Grapski

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Doug Grapski

VP Strategy and Operations

As Vice President of strategy and operations at Praia Health, Doug brings deep strategy, product and operational expertise to the team. As a part of the Providence Digital Innovation Group, he drove the incubation process for Praia Health from ideation through commercialization, making him deeply invested in the organization’s vision of transforming how health systems engage with patients and consumers through digital channels to make a significant impact on the healthcare industry at large.

Prior to working on Praia Health, Doug was focused on envisioning and executing on Providence’s digital strategy, managing transformative technology pilots, and supporting earlier incubation efforts—gaining valuable insight into how to best drive transformation at scale within a complex, matrixed organization. Prior to his role at Providence, Doug honed his skills at Deloitte Consulting in the Healthcare Strategy & Operations practice. During his time there, he provided strategic guidance to clients, focusing on digital and virtual care transformation, care management programs, value-based care delivery, and strategic planning initiatives.

Doug holds a BS in Biology and an MS in Health and BioPharmaceutical Economics from Lehigh University. When not in the office, he can be found in the mountains—whether on a backcountry ski slope, biking trails with his dog Cassie, or pulling his daughter to pre-school in her favorite wagon.

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Product
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Billy Jackson

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Billy Jackson

Product

As Vice President of Product, Billy Jackson is charged with defining the product vision and roadmap for the first digital flywheel for healthcare. He’s uniquely qualified to the role, bringing technical expertise, domain knowledge, a solution-oriented perspective, and a bit of humor to every interaction. He brings remarkable health system domain knowledge, deep EMR expertise, and a multi-faceted perspective to the Praia Health organization.

Prior to joining Praia Health he spend over 29 years at Providence, where his tenure touched most every aspect of the health system’s digital transformation. He has held key roles in product development, product operations, product management, telehealth solutions and support, IT services, data services, database administration and even a stint at the help desk. He helped move the organization first to the EMR, and then later to the cloud as a part of a team of rebels seeking to bring healthcare into the digital age. He most recently headed the product development team that envisioned and created the Praia Health Consumer Platform and oversaw the migration of over 3.5M user accounts onto it. Jackson’s humble start prepping dialysis machines for patients alongside the techs, nurses and doctors who cared for them—gives his work reality and heart.

When not transforming healthcare through technology, Jackson is a husband to a wonderful and kind woman, father of two brilliant daughters and loves fly fishing and forging in his spare time.

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Technology
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Robin Monks

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Robin Monks

Executive Vice President, Technology

Robin Monks has been designing, building, and scaling software for over 15 years, with a focus on technology that embraces progress and inspires positive change. As Executive Vice President of Technology at Praia Health, he now brings his deep PaaS, developer enablement, regulation compliance, scalable architecture, artificial intelligence (AI), and security-by-design experience and expertise to the leadership team.

Within the Providence Digital Innovation Group, he led the technology team for the Praia Health incubation effort, and was a visionary in the platform-orientation of the Praia Health solution. A startup veteran, Robin previously led engineering for Finn AI that focused on democratizing access to financial literacy to the millions of under-banked people across the world using AI. He led technology development at Thinkific, an online course platform that IPO’d in 2021 on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: THNC). He started his career working in Open Source and Open Standards where he contributed to Firefox and Drupal and he continues to believe in and foster support for open standards.

Robin is passionate about the mechanics and nuances of building and supporting great product and engineering teams, and is the author of the blog, “Room to be Awesome” Robin believes that sustainable products are best built through sustainable engineering teams.

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Board of directors

Board of Directors
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Justin Dearborn

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Founder & CEO, Praia Health
Board of Directors
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Navid Farzad

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Partner, Frist Cressey Ventures
Board of Directors
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Sara Vaezy

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Chief Product & Technology Officer, Chartis
Board of Directors
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Yuanling Yuan

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Partner, SignalFire

Our Investors

Frist Cressey Ventures logo
SignalFire logo
Epsilon Health Investors logo
Labcorp logo
Allumia Venture logo
Frist Cressey Ventures logo
SignalFire logo
Epsilon Health Investors logo
Labcorp logo
Allumia Venture logo

At Frist Cressey Ventures, we are committed to identifying companies with potential to revolutionize the healthcare landscape. Praia’s adoption of the digital flywheel concept showcases a commitment to dynamic, consumer-centric engagement that closely aligns with our mission of fostering innovation and driving positive change in healthcare.

Bill Frist headshot
Senator Bill Frist, M.D.
Co-founder and Partner of Frist Cressey Ventures

If we’re truly serious about improving healthcare, we need to get serious about enabling digital experiences that mirror what we receive and expect as a consumer in our interactions outside of healthcare. Praia Health does this—enabling personalized digital experiences that help patients navigate their health better and easier. Frist Cressey Ventures is excited to again partner with Providence—this time in the growth and expansion of Praia Health.

Navid Farzad headshot
Navid Farzad
Partner, Frist Cresssy Ventures

The Providence incubation model has some incredible advantages—enabling us to prove out the technology in a real-world setting and work alongside other health systems and technology partners during the incubation process. I’m thrilled with our remarkable funding partners who will help us as we move forward to drive transformation and impact at scale.

Sara Vaezy headshot
Sara Vaezy
Former EVP, Chief Strategy & Digital Officer, Providence and the Chief Product & Technology Officer, Chartis

Excited to support another impactful platform coming out of the Providence Digital Innovation Group’s incubator. Good for Providence and good for the industry as a whole.

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Dan Galles
Partner, Providence Ventures

Open and interoperable platforms have been transformative in other industries like fintech - we're excited to back Praia who is bringing the same approach to healthcare. By aggregating all aspects of patient data and personalizing recommendations through a seamless app, we can finally close care gaps and provide a concierge experience to everyone.

Yuanling Yuan headshot
Yuanling Yuan
Partner, SignalFire

At Frist Cressey Ventures, we are committed to identifying companies with potential to revolutionize the healthcare landscape. Praia’s adoption of the digital flywheel concept showcases a commitment to dynamic, consumer-centric engagement that closely aligns with our mission of fostering innovation and driving positive change in healthcare.

Bill Frist headshot
Senator Bill Frist, M.D.
Co-founder and Partner of Frist Cressey Ventures

If we’re truly serious about improving healthcare, we need to get serious about enabling digital experiences that mirror what we receive and expect as a consumer in our interactions outside of healthcare. Praia Health does this—enabling personalized digital experiences that help patients navigate their health better and easier. Frist Cressey Ventures is excited to again partner with Providence—this time in the growth and expansion of Praia Health.

Navid Farzad headshot
Navid Farzad
Partner, Frist Cresssy Ventures

The Providence incubation model has some incredible advantages—enabling us to prove out the technology in a real-world setting and work alongside other health systems and technology partners during the incubation process. I’m thrilled with our remarkable funding partners who will help us as we move forward to drive transformation and impact at scale.

Sara Vaezy headshot
Sara Vaezy
Former EVP, Chief Strategy & Digital Officer, Providence and the Chief Product & Technology Officer, Chartis

Excited to support another impactful platform coming out of the Providence Digital Innovation Group’s incubator. Good for Providence and good for the industry as a whole.

Dan Galles headshot
Dan Galles
Partner, Providence Ventures

Open and interoperable platforms have been transformative in other industries like fintech - we're excited to back Praia who is bringing the same approach to healthcare. By aggregating all aspects of patient data and personalizing recommendations through a seamless app, we can finally close care gaps and provide a concierge experience to everyone.

Yuanling Yuan headshot
Yuanling Yuan
Partner, SignalFire