Tampa General Hospital

Scott Arnold

Scott Arnold is the Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Tampa General Hospital—a nationally renowned nonprofit academic medical center. He joined Tampa General Hospital in 2010 to manage the conversion of its electronic medical record system, which was the largest technology implementation in the hospital’s history. Currently, Arnold is leading the digital transformation across the organization.

Prior to joining Tampa General, Arnold served as a vice president for Mercy Health in Saint Louis, and held leadership positions with Daleen Technologies, Boeing, and McDonnell Douglas Aerospace.

In conversation with Healthcare Tech Outlook magazine, Arnold sheds light on how recognizing and implementing modern and emerging technologies can help the healthcare industry create better care coordination and navigation.

What challenges did the pandemic bring into the healthcare space, and what trends have you observed emerging from it?

The pandemic brought the challenge of demand intensity into healthcare. It created pressure like never before on nurses, providers, lab testing, bed availability and other health services. The pandemic also put a brighter spotlight on an existing problem of providing effective care coordination, care navigation, and access. Listening to the annual JP Morgan Health conference earlier this year, a clear trend appeared wherein nearly all major health system leaders announcing some sort of initiative focused on care coordination.

What trends have you observed emerging recently and how are you leveraging these trends in any of your project initiatives?

Our health system remains focused on what is best for our patients and community. We recognize an opportunity to provide the ultimate solution for care coordination and care navigation. In fact, we have embarked on a project to create a world-class experience center that pulls it all together for patients, providing the optimal care coordination, navigation and experience for our patients. There will be a blend of process, technology, people and culture that will transform care delivery. Healthcare has a lot to learn from other industries, and while healthcare is very personal for each and every person, there are things we can do to remove the feeling of “transactions” in healthcare and provide better, integrated experience in varied journeys toward health. A mix of digital and physical access points and tools are here to stay. If we take the airline industry, for instance, we will see how it has transformed through digital over the years. Consumers are in control of choosing their preferred airline, price point, schedule, seat, meal and even rental cars or hotels. While healthcare isn’t selling perishable airline seats, it can learn from airline transformation and apply it to, in some cases, the healthcare space with a positive shift of work onto the patient as a consumer for scheduling, access, medication refills and other conveniences.

“Healthcare has a lot to learn from other industries that have successfully undergone digital transformation.”

Another major trend our health system is leveraging falls into the category of new tools to make sense of our data. Data has been around for a long time, so to call it a trend is a stretch, but our tools to create insights is getting so much better. The amount of data we are amassing is overwhelming, but powerful at the same time. A lot of the data in healthcare is unstructured, so tools that interpret and transform our data into information, ultimately leading to action is a worthy investment. So far, several AI-based technologies have been supportive of healthcare. There’s a rumor prevalent in the world that technology will overthrow human decision-making, but it is not true. For instance, AI certainly does not replace the art and science of a clinician’s intuition for care and treatment, but instead, supports them in better decision-making. To that end, the use of data and insights in almost every healthcare operation and application have greatly improved the care coordination system. However, the industry worldwide still has a long way to go and become better for the good of humanity. Trend-wise, we are certainly using data to inform new care pathways and to improve the quality of our services and patient outcomes.

How do you envision the future of the healthcare space with all potential transformations happening in it?

Healthcare is complicated. While its complex, there is so much opportunity. I believe the way we use data in healthcare and health related research is the key to transformations ahead. Data and insights will continue to enhance and improve healthcare operations, clinical decision making, research and better patient outcomes. Analytics is not going to go out of style anytime soon. In fact, it will continue to influence healthcare in ways we haven’t even discovered yet. When I think about my own aging process and what may be ahead in thirty or forty years, I want device innovations and streaming data to enable me to have my health concerns addressed at home. As health systems manage a patient census today, our future will likely be transformed to having a “virtual census” with patients in “beds” at home that are monitored (data/devices) and cared for (humans) in their own home. Finding our way to lowering the cost of healthcare for humanity will require us to be innovative in ways like this, reserving physical hospital beds for the critically ill patients, and healing less sick patients in their own home. That future is now, we just need to improve it and scale it.   We are doing it.

What advice would you give to your peers and fellow colleagues serving as CIOs or are looking forward to become one in the future?

My advice to peers and aspiring CIOs is to focus on building and surrounding themselves with expert, caring, innovative and responsive teams and leaders. The CIO’s leadership team is ideally a group of trusted advisors that know how to inspire their own teams for best results and systematically have “heirs and spares” in a succession plan to eliminate single points of failure. Implied here is the most senior leaders are also great succession candidates for the role of CIO.  From a team perspective, the best results are achieved by a  healthy diversity within the workforce that identify with the needs of patients and their families.  Have patience, have vision, be a transparent communicator, a good listener and kind with team members, colleagues and patients. Finally, be empathetic to patients and be attentive to their clinical journeys. In a nutshell, modeling best leadership behaviors, putting together a talented and diverse team and taking good care of them is my best advice.