Plenty of digital health companies assume they’re built to go global…until they hit a wall. Sometimes it’s compliance. Sometimes it’s culture. Most often, it’s the product itself. Scaling across borders takes more than translation. It takes planning and a willingness to rethink what already works.
Miles Barr, Chief Technology Officer at RLDatix, knows what it takes to get health IT products into multiple countries. RLDatix is successful in five different countries. In this exclusive interview at RLDatix’s global headquarters in London UK, he broke down the systems, mindsets, and assumptions that transform domestic hopefuls into global players.
Key Takeaways
- Design for Flexibility, Not Just Fit. Even in highly regulated environments like healthcare, building overly rigid, region-specific products will limit scalability. RLDatix uses internal taxonomy mapping to handle varying country requirements without fragmenting product architecture.
- Go Local Before You Scale Global. International success is about understanding systems, culture, and regulation. RLDatix leans on local teams and early customer feedback to avoid costly missteps.
- Make Data Entry Disappear. The more fields you add, the fewer incidents get reported. RLDatix is using conversational AI to make safety reporting easier by extracting details automatically and pulling from EHRs to reduce the burden on frontline staff.
Build for Patterns, Not Exceptions
RLDatix didn’t localize their product with band-aids. They engineered it with flexibility from the start. By creating an internal data model that maps regional schemas and reporting standards to a shared taxonomy, they gave themselves room to grow with new technologies like AI and into new geographies.
“We offer a lot of customization,” said Barr. “But we also put in a lot of effort to map internally to a common taxonomy, because that allows us to then train AI models which we can deploy to all countries.”
Bottom line from Barr: look for common patterns and requirements. Use that insight to build reusable and flexible infrastructure to accommodate different regional needs without having to build separate versions. In other words: design for differences instead of working around them.
Know What You Don’t Know and Get Local
Global expansion doesn’t fail because of language barriers. It fails because teams don’t know what they’re missing. RLDatix stayed ahead by building local teams, leaning on local customer partnerships, and staying curious.
“The first step is to find out what you don’t know,” explained Barr. “What’s different about that country’s healthcare system? Then make sure that you build up that knowledge.”
According to Barr, RLDatix resisted the instinct to replicate success from one country to the next. This counter-intuitive approach opened the product team to new ideas. Only after understanding local requirements did they revisit what could be reused from past builds.
Remaining flexible helped RLDatix be successful in five countries and counting.
AI Is What’s Next
RLDatix’s flexible architecture means international requirements and new features can be more easily incorporated. The company recenly released Smart Entry – a new AI-enabled data entry capabilities that reduces the time required and improves the accuracy of documenting an adverse event or near miss.
“We’ve been working on an AI conversational program which first allows the person reporting just to describe what happens in natural language,” said Barr. “It then asks for specific information, rather than pointing to a form 20 fields deep.”
The company is also working on pulling additional incident details from various internal systems, like the EHR, further reducing data entry.
Less data entry means higher reporting rates for safety events, near misses, and patient feedback – something that the company has heard loud and clear from all its customers.
The Architecture for Global Success
For Barr and RLDatix, scaling globally isn’t just about local staff and supporting multiple languages. It’s about designing for difference, embedding local insight, and treating compliance as core infrastructure. They actively resist the temptation to impose their success from one country onto another. Instead, they work to understand local requirements BEFORE they roll out new solutions.
“We’re definitely a global company,” said Barr. “Because we built like one from the beginning.”
Learn more about RLDatix at https://www.rldatix.com/
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