Rady Children’s Health is consolidating analytics and AI-enabling services on a governed cloud platform to reduce friction for clinical, operational, and financial users. Caroline Peika, Director, Integration & Analytics, said the program pairs a centralized data environment with a private retrieval-augmented generation chatbot to turn internal documents into reliable answers with citations. The approach aims to raise data quality, clarify ownership, and shorten the path from question to decision for busy hospital teams.

The modernization effort treats the cloud as a curated environment with clear intake rules, lineage, and stewardship. Peika said the operating model sets expectations for source system accountability, common definitions, and documentation so downstream consumers can work from the same reference points. “We put controls around ingestion and transformation so people can trust the outputs that land in shared spaces.” The intent is to move analysts away from duplicate extracts and local spreadsheets toward governed data products that serve multiple use cases across care delivery, finance, and operations.

As the platform scales, she said governance is embedded in routine work. Intake requests must identify owners, business purposes, and refresh patterns; cost forecasting accompanies new pipelines; and role-based access limits proliferation. The result is a single environment that prioritizes reuse, lowers redundancy, and supports rapid provisioning for analytics and data science without sacrificing oversight.

Private RAG Chatbot Surfaces Gaps

The companion initiative is a policy-aware chatbot that answers questions by citing specific passages from approved sources. Peika said the service quickly revealed a familiar challenge: outdated or conflicting policies across departments. “The moment you ask for a citation, you discover where documents are stale, inconsistent, or scattered.”  That visibility becomes a forcing function for departmental clean-up because owners must validate the very sources that power responses.



After the pilot showed value with HR, compliance, and IT policy documents, the team created a feedback loop so users can flag weak answers and request corpus updates. Department leaders now curate their own collections, retire obsolete material, and establish refresh cycles tied to policy review calendars. The chatbot, in turn, reduces email chains and ad-hoc explanations by providing a consistent, searchable record with provenance that stands up to audit.

Buy-or-Build With Continuous Ownership

Commercial platforms help accelerate deployment, yet the enterprise still needs sustained engineering and product ownership. Peika emphasized that vendors can supply components, but health systems remain responsible for validation, corpus hygiene, and upgrades. “Whether you buy or you build, there is always ongoing build.”  That includes re-indexing content as policies change, updating models, and monitoring answer quality as usage grows.

Scope discipline matters. The goal is not to chase feature parity with public assistants like ChatGPT; it is to deliver dependable, governed answers to institutional questions, accept secure file uploads, preserve conversation context within policy, and route feedback into improvement sprints. Peika added that choosing high-value use cases with clear owners increases adoption, because leaders can see fewer interrupts and faster responses for their teams.

Funding, Performance and Resilience

Cloud cost control is a design requirement, something critical with cloud initiatives. Peika said the program bakes in least-privilege access, workload quotas, and spending dashboards to prevent unmanaged experimentation and bill shock. Business partners receive estimates for data movement, storage, and compute before projects begin, aligning expectations with budgets. “Guardrails protect us technically and financially ...