Providence Digital Innovation Group names new product and technology incubation head

The Providence Digital Innovation Group announced that Andy Chu joined the team as Senior Vice President of Product and Technology Incubation. Andy is responsible for building world-class digital experiences for both consumers and caregivers at Providence and incubating healthcare SaaS solutions that become commercial offerings for the broader health care ecosystem.

Prior to Providence, Andy held a number of leadership roles in career management, travel, omni-channel commerce, search, consumer messaging and enterprise software including Microsoft, to bring customer-centric, innovative, and profitable solutions to market. He brings over 20 years of cross discipline leadership experience in product, design, technology, business development and marketing—within both mature and start-up companies. He will report to Aaron Martin, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Providence.

“I’m thrilled to have Andy on board to lead our product and technology incubation efforts,” said Martin. “Andy has proven experience in driving innovation and building and commercializing scalable systems in complex environments—and health care definitely fits the bill of a complex environment. Andy’s enterprise tech chops, focus on foundational elements and unique growth perspective are going to be a fantastic addition to the team.”

The Providence Digital Innovation Group is a health innovation center within Providence that identifies the biggest problems in health care and enables digital technology breakthroughs that advance health and ease people’s way. The team of strategists, software engineers, marketers and investors are focused on driving disruption from within the health system. Working together with clinical and operational teams at Providence they shape, build and scale high impact digital solutions within Providence—and then commercialize and launch those solutions in market.

“Providence has been both extremely active and practical in pursuing innovative solutions through delivery of the right set of software and infrastructure to functionally improve the experiences of consumers, patients, clinicians and technology partners,” said Andy Chu. “The Digital Innovation Group’s ecosystem approach is both novel and exciting. Solutions built here have an immediate impact within Providence, and then serve as a means for other health systems to innovate—driving more impact industry wide.”

“This “inside view” offers our world-class technical talent a unique perspective, and the opportunity to solve some of the world’s most complex technology, system and user experience problems at scale,” Chu continued. “While there are many incubation labs and corporate ventures within the health care industry, none take this ecosystem approach—solving the foundational software, system and people issues in one approach.”

The Providence Digital Innovation Group commercialized three technologies to date. Xealth, spun out in 2017 and enables clinicians to prescribe and monitor digital health content, apps and services as easily as they do medications or orders today. The second was Circle, a women's health technology company, sold to Wildflower Health in 2018. The third was DexCare, a platform that intelligently orchestrates digital demand and health system capacity across all lines of care which was spun out in March of 2021.  

More information about the Providence Digital Innovation Group can be found at: www.providence-dig.org and digital insight, research and resources can be found in the groups Resource Center.

About Providence 
Providence is a national, not-for-profit Catholic health system comprising a diverse family of organizations and driven by a belief that health is a human right. With 52 hospitals, over 1,000 physician clinics, senior services, supportive housing, and many other health and educational services, the health system and its partners employ more than 120,000 caregivers serving communities across seven states – Alaska, California, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, and Washington, with system offices in Renton, Wash., and Irvine, Calif. Learn about our vision of health for a better world at Providence.org.