Cincinnati Children’s has spent years building up a body of pediatric clinical and operational knowledge — protocols, standards and guidance developed and refined across its own campuses.
Until recently, that knowledge lived scattered across systems, shared drives and one-off conversations. Now the organization is packaging it into an AI-powered platform, and it plans to sell other pediatric organizations access to it.
The tool, called the Learning Community Platform, is already live across Cincinnati Children’s workforce and is being tested by beta users at a handful of additional pediatric sites. It combines a curated repository of Cincinnati Children’s protocols with a conversational AI search feature, letting clinicians ask plain-language questions and get answers pulled only from vetted, hospital-authored material rather than the open web.
“We strive for clinician excellence here at Cincinnati Children’s, and this pain point’s been around for a while,” Jen Ruschman, assistant vice president of information services at Cincinnati Children’s, told Becker’s. “How do we get the right information into the right clinician’s hands at the right time?”
That problem has intensified as published literature and AI-generated content have piled up faster than clinicians can absorb it, Ms. Ruschman said. That pressure, combined with confidence in the depth of Cincinnati Children’s clinical playbooks, is what pushed the health system to create the proprietary platform.
“We looked at a few commercially available products … but we just didn’t find anything that really met our needs in the way that we wanted it to function in clinicians’ hands off the shelf,” Ms. Ruschman said. “They had a lot of the features, but it would require some customization, and so that was part of the reason we decided to build it ourselves.”
Cincinnati Children’s is now formalizing the solution as a commercial product, with membership pricing that varies by an organization’s size.
Access for outside organizations runs through Cincinnati Children’s advisory network. Other pediatric organizations have long sought Cincinnati Children’s protocols, typically through ad hoc consulting arrangements. The platform is designed to replace those one-off engagements with continuous, on-demand access, supplemented by a feature the health system calls Ask an Advisor.
Ms. Ruschman described how a member organization might use the feature to escalate a search into a 30-minute consultation with a Cincinnati Children’s expert: “‘I searched this. I wanted to know how you take care of asthma in a 4-year-old, but now I want to talk a little bit about how I might apply that in my organization.'”
She acknowledged the market already has AI search tools health systems can layer onto their own content. But she said her organization’s edge is that its answers are sourced from Cincinnati Children’s, one of the nation’s top-ranked pediatric systems.
“I don’t have to do my AI search and then try to weed through what you returned to figure out: Is that valuable or not?” she said. “I always joke with people that I think AI is like talking to my teenager. They don’t know what they’re talking about, but they say it emphatically.”
The platform’s credibility rests partly on a governance structure designed to keep it from going stale. Forty to 50 content owners across specialty areas are responsible for reviewing and refreshing the protocols in their domain, Ms. Ruschman said, with patient-facing content typically reviewed on a three-year cycle.
For Cincinnati Children’s, the commercial pitch to other pediatric organizations rests on the same case it’s making internally: A nurse who once carried a binder of line-placement procedures can now pull up the same information on her phone. And a health system with decades of pediatric-specific expertise is betting other children’s hospitals will pay to plug into it.
“We want to see people be able to take care of kids better all across the country and the world, and we think this is one way to start to do that,” Ms. Ruschman said.
At the Becker's 11th Annual IT + Revenue Cycle Conference: The Future of AI & Digital Health, taking place September 14–17 in Chicago, healthcare executives and digital leaders from across the country will come together to explore how AI, interoperability, cybersecurity, and revenue cycle innovation are transforming care delivery, strengthening financial performance, and driving the next era of digital health. Apply for complimentary registration now.