The six-hospital system is expanding its partnership with Palantir to fuel nearly all of its data analytics, an executive told Becker’s.
“It’s absolutely going to be the fabric of our health system operating system, if you will, that ties lots of things together,” said Scott Arnold, executive vice president and chief digital and innovation officer of Tampa General Hospital.
Tampa General has been working with Palantir for several years already, from optimizing nurse staffing and bed placement in the post-anesthesia care unit to quickly organizing its blood supply after a cyberattack befell its blood bank. Mr. Arnold described Palantir as a “little Swiss Army knife for us.”
But the $2 billion-plus health system is rewiring its command center in the coming months to Palantir. “It’s going to tackle more than just throughput of a hospital and streamlining operations, but getting patients going from the outpatient setting to the inpatient setting to the post-acute setting, and then even hospital at home,” Mr. Arnold said.
“What’s special about [Palantir] is the fact that they didn’t sell us a piece of software and say, ‘Here, good luck. You’re going to figure it out on your own,'” he said. “They sent the people along with it so we would guarantee success in using it. Along with that comes a premium. But the premium, frankly, is well worth it.”
Besides teaming up with the military, Palantir — which Mr. Arnold noted likely provided technology that helped the U.S. track down Osama bin Laden — also collaborates with health systems including Cleveland Clinic, Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare and Omaha-based Nebraska Medicine.
Mr. Arnold said U.S. Central Command, located at MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa, has expressed interest in partnering with Tampa General on their work with Palantir.
“We’re going to meet again, but we talked about being able to solve problems in hours and days instead of months and years, which is the way it’s been for us,” he said.
He hopes the Palantir partnership will eventually solve the perplexing issue of care coordination: “orchestrating somebody’s health from beginning to end, including financial navigation through their insurance and all the episodes of any specialist they need to see or diagnostics that need to be done,” whether the patients are “digital natives” or not.
“That’s the big hairy thing that’s in front of us,” Mr. Arnold said.
