From legacy silos to AI-ready data in 7 months

Rady Children’s Health is a premier pediatric healthcare system in Southern California. It unites the expertise of Children’s Hospital of Orange County, nationally recognized for its commitment to safe, high-quality care, and Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego, ranked among the nation’s top 10 children’s hospitals by US News & World Report for 2025–2026.

With the recent merger, the organization faced a major decision: renew the agreement with its existing data and analytics vendor at a much higher cost or replatform and modernize its data and reporting environment. The catch? With only seven months before the vendor agreement expired, both the decision and any work that followed had to be done quickly.

Caroline Peika, director of integrations and analytics at Rady Children’s Health, shares the big picture: “Our vision is to build and operate in an interconnected healthcare ecosystem where everything talks to each other. Our work with Slalom and their technology partners is the starting point for both our data platform strategy and our generative AI strategy.”

Years of custom reporting, bespoke dashboards, and informal workarounds had created a sprawling, siloed data landscape across the healthcare system. At the time of the merger, there were 92 legacy data offerings in their environment, many built to serve narrow use cases. Those offerings lived within 45 individual data silos, and teams frequently passed Excel files back and forth.

The need for timely and trustworthy data was business critical, too. “We wanted to operate with a data freshness threshold that’s under an hour, which our legacy platform couldn’t give us, and that was a big blocker,” says Peika. She continues, “We’re taking care of children here. Quality and speed are essential.”

Because of the constraints imposed by the legacy vendor, it was just as important to get the work done quickly as it was to complete it intelligently. Rather than simply rebuilding the existing data structure, Slalom recognized the urgent need to prioritize the data and reporting most relevant for business, regulatory, or clinical impact.

Travis O’Neill, director at Slalom, notes that the migration team drove meaningful impact by introducing a structured, collaborative approach. The team delivered sprint by sprint—bringing clarity, momentum, and confidence to each phase of the transition. According to Carey Moretti, a senior director at Slalom, “The collaboration emphasized thoughtful prioritization, helping the team stay focused on the most important business, regulatory, and operational data priorities.”

This involved shifting the conversation with organizational stakeholders from volume to impact. The team invested time upfront explicitly defining a common data model, quality checks, and governance. As a result, Rady Children’s Health could move from “This is how we’ve always done it” to “This is what’s possible”—aligning everyone to essential priorities with actual vs. theatrical timelines.

Naturally, as priorities shifted, some teams felt deprioritized or worried their needs would not be met. To manage that tension, our teams partnered in sprint-level planning, reviews, and white glove user acceptance testing (UAT) feedback cycles.

Ultimately, more than 60% of the original 92 data offerings were cut or consolidated, simplifying the environment and reducing downstream risk. Teams that once relied on informal, individual relationships for reporting now operate from shared definitions and governed sources.

As Jason Gough, a managing director at Slalom, explains, “Many healthcare organizations are told by consultants that they’ll need to wait 9-18 months before seeing value for this sort of modernization. The speed at which we worked through this data modernization with Caroline and team—and their commitment to prioritizing outcomes—is exceptional.”

Gough shares, “The leadership team at Rady Children’s Health has a lot of appetite for investing in innovation. They know it’s an unlock for even more exceptional patient care.” For instance, as the migration and modernization effort matured, it converged with an enterprise generative AI (GenAI) initiative called RCH Chat, an internal knowledge assistant.

Rady Children’s Health needed an AI tool based on its organizational values and regulatory realities. With a secure, governed data foundation in place, the healthcare system was well positioned to offer internal tools that protect sensitive information while still delivering real value to staff.

Rady Children’s Health now owns its own data and destiny. What the team has built isn’t just a modern data platform or a faster path to governed enterprise AI adoption. By unifying data, simplifying complexity, and building trust across a newly merged organization, teams now have the agility to move quickly and confidently. This agility, speed, and trust result in less time navigating systems and more availability to support clinicians, patients, and families.

As Peika reflects, “This journey was transformative. Our stakeholders, who came from different organizations before we merged, finally experienced what data and analytics offerings should be. At the end of the day, we could all see this is about enabling people across our organization, so they can focus on the children in our care.”