New Data Platform Will Expand Pediatric Research Possibilities

When pediatric health data is scattered across many systems, it slows down research, delays medical insights, and makes it difficult to address health disparities.

Children’s health data currently exist in isolated silos at hospitals, clinics, research institutions, and public health organizations. 

The Children’s Hospital Association’s new Children’s Health Learning Platform (CHLP) will bring data together to help hospitals and researchers collaborate, uncover health trends, and improve care. 

The platform has been selected as a winner of the 2025 Amazon Web Services Children’s Health Innovation Award and recipient of the Imagine Grant, designed to accelerate innovation to improve children’s health with advanced cloud services.  

“The learning platform will provide faster, smarter insights that enhance care delivery and drive improvements in children’s health,” said Michael Roco, CHA’s vice president of data transformation. “I am proud that this critical project to improve collaboration across pediatric health care has been recognized for the value it will bring to children nationwide.” 

Data fragmentation makes it difficult to understand health patterns, develop treatments, and implement prevention strategies. It also makes it more challenging for researchers to find sufficient sample sizes for pediatric studies since childhood diseases have lower prevalence rates. 

Without centralized data analytics, medical insights and the development of new treatments and interventions take years rather than months. What’s more, fragmented data hinders efforts to identify and address health disparities affecting children from different socioeconomic, racial, and geographic backgrounds. 

The CHLP addresses the challenge of fragmented information by unifying pediatric data and supporting research and collaboration. 

Three distinct features of the platform will accelerate improvement and enhance collaboration: 

1. Secure, HIPAA-compliant cloud technology to enable collaborative research. 
2. AI tools to support the work of uncovering patterns, predicting outcomes, and using actionable insights from large amounts of health data. 
3. A network of 300+ pediatric researchers to help co-develop use cases and maximize impact. 

CHA’s data programs contain more than 140 million patient encounters and over 25 billion rows of structured data, providing children’s hospitals with unique dashboards, insights, and self-service tools. 

And our tools allow children’s hospitals to identify peer hospitals appropriate for comparison to drive process changes that improve patient care and financial resiliency. 

The CHLP will build on CHA’s Pediatric Health Information System® by integrating its data into a more advanced AWS-hosted environment with capabilities that enhance research speed and scalability. A pilot launch will begin in 2026 with a small group of researchers, led by CHA’s research team and research network.  

The integrated data platform and our suite of services will make pediatric care more intelligent, efficient, and equitable.  

CHLP is a bold step forward in pediatric health to break down barriers, speed up research, improve outcomes for children, and foster collaboration and innovation across the nation’s pediatric hospitals. 

We are proud to join other leading children’s hospitals who use technology to transform the ways we care for children. Congratulations to these CHA member hospitals who were also recognized with the 2025 award: 

• Boston Children’s Hospital 
• Nationwide Children’s Hospital 
• Phoenix Children’s Hospital 

Learn more about the award and this year’s recipients.