By: Giles Bruce
Rady Children’s Health, based in San Diego and Orange, Calif., has created its own private generative AI platform to answer questions and perform administrative tasks for employees.
For example, a staffer might write, “I need to take these two days off,” and the GPT would complete the PTO request in Workday. The hope is to create efficiencies at Rady, which merged with Children’s Hospital of Orange County in 2025 to create a roughly $3 billion health system.
“You know the saying: ‘No margin, no mission,’” John Henderson, vice president and chief information and digital officer of Rady Children’s Health, told Becker’s. “As technology leaders, we have to drive value, and we have to do it in the most efficient way to help drive the outcomes that we want for our patients and patient families. And this is one of the areas we think we can make a big impact.”
The merger, which effectively doubled the organization’s size, helped spur the creation of the platform. And it made more financial sense for the health system to build its own GPT — using Claude from AI startup Anthropic through an existing partnership with Amazon Web Services — rather than buying what was available commercially. Rady is starting with administrative use cases but plans to eventually pivot to clinical.
“What we want to be able to accomplish is really eliminating inefficiencies and eliminating burden, whether it’s human resources, whether it’s the finance group, whether it’s our strategy group, who create a lot of content and have to research a lot of information,” Mr. Henderson said.
Prompts might include, “Send me a profile of this vendor,” or “Create a description for this new job.” Employees will no longer have to log in to individual platforms they might not be familiar with.
“So you have your ERPs, you have your core systems of record, and we have great partners when it comes to those,” Mr. Henderson said. “But my goal is to make them irrelevant in the context of how we interact with them. I want to be able to give us the opportunity where, whatever we need our employees and associates to do in those systems, they just tell the GPT, ‘Here’s what I need for you to do.’”
The GPT can now summarize files and access Rady’s intranet, which has a bevy of customized information. The three-hospital system intends to next introduce a feature called “Ask the Data,” where staffers can query Rady’s various dashboards and analytics applications, including patient censuses, quality measures and financials.
“We want to make this broadly used across the entire health system,” Mr. Henderson said. “There’s pressure in the healthcare industry — regulations, CMS guidelines changing — and the one thing we want to make sure we do is be as efficient as we possibly can with the capabilities we have available to us, improving our outcomes and helping support the bottom line that we have to achieve.”
