Tampa General Hospital

Scott Arnold

Scott Arnold has extensive experience in healthcare IT and digital transformation. He has accumulated significant experience in the healthcare sector with a focus on leveraging technology to enhance patient care and streamline operations.

Insights about Professional Journey and Current Responsibilities

I've spent my career immersed in technology, though my journey didn't start in healthcare. I began in aerospace and transitioned into the software industry. For the past 20 years, however, I've been dedicated to healthcare IT, with 14 of those years as the head of IT at Tampa General Hospital. Currently, I serve as the Executive Vice President and Chief Digital and Innovation Officer. In this role, I’m responsible for IT, clinical engineering, biomedical services, analytics and cyber-security. I also oversee TGH Ventures, our innovation and investment arm that focuses on startups and emerging technologies.

Challenges in Healthcare Analytics Today

The industry faces a significant challenge in being data-rich but lacks meaningful insights from that data. Most of the data is unstructured and makes it difficult to extract meaningful information without the use of advanced technologies like generative AI and natural language processing. These technologies have the potential to unlock the value hidden within unstructured data. There is vast amount of data but the industry has only begun to tap into its potential for advancing research, gaining a deeper understanding of disease states and predicting better pathways to improved outcomes. This presents both a challenge and an exciting opportunity for us to resolve in the future.

Trends and Strategies to Overcome Healthcare Challenges

Generative AI and models are playing a crucial role in addressing the challenge of unlocking the value within the vast amounts of data we have. Another contributing factor is the cost pressures we're facing in healthcare, which are becoming a powerful forcing function. The current rate of healthcare cost increases is unsustainable and the industry is feeling these pressures. As a result, we’re being driven to innovate rapidly and explore new technologies and AI tools to solve problems efficiently and at a lower cost.

“Healthcare is on the brink of a digital revolution, driven by the power of AI and advanced analytics. Using the value hidden in our vast and unstructured data, we can revolutionize patient care to improve patient outcomes in ways we've never seen before”

Notable Projects and Key Takeaways  

I'm extremely proud of our recent progress with our analytics platform, especially through the partnerships we've established. Our philosophy is to focus on partnerships rather than reinventing the wheel ourselves, which can be time-consuming.   We’ve partnered with Palantir and it has allowed us to unlock incredible value from our data through advanced analytics to solve problems within hours.

One major initiative we're currently undertaking is the complete overhaul of the digital infrastructure of our care coordination center at Tampa General Hospital using Palantir’s technology. The analytics platform we've built with Palantir has equipped us with cutting-edge tools like generative AI models to read and interpret unstructured data, generate valuable insights and predict the next steps for patients. Our ultimate goal is to create a forecasted patient itinerary for everyone in our hospital, leveraging AI and our analytics platform. This is a project we're deeply invested in right now and I’m personally very excited about the potential it holds.

Glimpse into the Future of Healthcare Analytics

The healthcare industry tends to be slower in adopting new technologies compared to other sectors.  This delay can be attributed to factors like lengthy decision-making processes, funding challenges and the time required to navigate through various committees. However, in the next 36 months, we'll see a significant shift, with more health systems beginning to harness the potential of generative AI in ways we haven't seen before.  These systems will also start unlocking the value hidden within the unstructured data, particularly the notes in our health records.

Advice for Senior Leaders to Improve Healthcare

I strongly advocate for a constructive approach to leverage analytics in healthcare. Data and analytics are the future, holding the key to unlocking innovative treatments, therapies and faster healing methods.  Using the power of our data, we can generate valuable insights that will revolutionize healthcare and improve outcomes for people worldwide.