Incubated at Providence, one of the nation’s largest and most innovative health systems, Praia Health™ is a consumer experience orchestration platform for health systems that is revolutionizing the delivery of individualized health solutions at scale.
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 and currently sits on the boards of The Gateway Foundation, Curio Digital Therapeutics and Exponential AI.
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 and currently sits on the boards of The Gateway Foundation, Curio Digital Therapeutics and Exponential AI.
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 and currently sits on the boards of The Gateway Foundation, Curio Digital Therapeutics and Exponential AI.
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.
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.
Kurt Hammond has more than 30 years of experience scaling healthcare software brands, including enterprise healthcare IT software sales, product management and business development. He has been involved in seven startup companies, where his experience has resulted in more than $2 billion of combined value upon exit. He has launched several first-of-its-kind solutions, including spinal fusion cages, AAA stent-grafts, GI/endoscopy documentation software, vendor-neutral imaging archives and online proctored tests.
Kurt has extensive experience building and leading highly effective commercial programs for healthcare technology companies. Most recently, he served as Chief Commercial Officer at Exo, where he led the sales, marketing, partnerships and customer success strategies for Exo’s ultrasound ecosystem. Prior to Exo, he served as Chief Growth Officer at Halo Health and eMed Digital Healthcare.
Previously, he served as Vice President and then Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for imaging company Merge Healthcare. After Merge’s acquisition by IBM, Kurt served as Vice President of Global Sales for IBM Watson Health and was promoted to Global VP of Partnerships and Business Development. Kurt and his wife live in Evanston, Illinois with their two children.
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.
Jared Johnson is a senior marketing leader who is passionate about growing revenue for healthcare technology brands. He has 20 years of progressive marketing leadership roles and consulting experience from startups to the Fortune 500. As a champion of consumer transformation, he believes technology can enable healthcare to become easier for everyday people.
At Praia Health, Johnson serves as Chief Marketing Officer where he is responsible for building the Praia Health brand and driving demand for the company’s products and services. Prior to joining Praia, Jared served as a senior digital strategist for some of the top healthcare, MedTech and medical device brands in the country, including St. Jude Medical, W. L. Gore, and Phoenix Children’s Hospital. He continually explores the business value of emerging digital channels and develops best practices to understand consumer behaviors. In 2020, he founded the Consumer-First Health Group, the first and only networking group for leaders interested in healthcare consumer transformation.
Jared is a rapping keynote speaker, host of the long-running Healthcare Rap Podcast, winner of the Medigy HITMC 2021 Marketer of the Year Award, and author of two books, Marketing Forward and Connect the Docs.
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.
About the Name
Praia do Norte, a beach in Portugal, is known for its giant breaking waves that form due to the presence of the underwater Nazare Canyon that creates constructive interference between incoming swells—making the waves much larger.
Praia Health is designed to generate a wave of digital transformation through digital for health systems.
Join Us!
We’re looking for top technology, operational and commercial talent with a passion for changing healthcare. We’re a remote team with core employees based in both Chicago and Seattle. See our open job postings.
