Becker's Hospital Review

40 INNOVATION How Tampa General Hospital uses the same tech as the military By Giles Bruce T ampa (Fla.) General Hospital is transitioning to a Defense Department technology contractor to power its operational command center. e 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 aer 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 soware and say, 'Here, good luck. You're going to figure it out on your own,'" he said. "ey 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. "at's the big hairy thing that's in front of us," Mr. Arnold said. n How smart rooms attract talent to Indiana health system By Giles Bruce R etrofitting about 250 hospital rooms with smart technology has helped boost recruitment and retention at an Indiana health system. Richmond, Ind.-based Reid Health has rooms armed with digital whiteboards and door signs with information fed from the Epic EHR. When clinicians enter the room after a code is initiated, their badges prompt real-time data on labs and medications to pop up on the screen. "We all see the staffing challenges with nursing, and this isn't something that's going to improve," Misti Foust-Cofield, MSN, RN, vice president and chief nursing officer of Reid Health, told Becker's at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. "Our goal is for this to be a recruitment and retention tool for our teams and to better serve our patients. Anytime that we can save on our steps, that we can take off some of the cognitive burden, that's our intention." The technology is already attracting talent through a smart room simulation center at a local community college and Indiana University campus. "It's a wonderful recruitment piece," Ms. Foust-Cofield said. "It essentially makes for a seamless transition to our work environment." The one-hospital system takes a collaborative approach to technology. Ms. Foust-Cofield works closely with her CIO to, as she put it, "give input on the sandwich I'm going to have to eat." The biggest challenge has been figuring out how to be "thoughtful and intentional" about how they're educating staff as to not inundate them with new technology, Ms. Foust- Cofield said. "Nurses are very open to technology," she said. "Nurses are advocates, as long as they're included in the process." Reid Health also launched virtual sitting last week, addressing staffing and employee safety concerns, and plans to unveil virtual nursing over the summer. The health system only considers technology that integrates with Epic or its smart technology vendor, Hellocare. "We have the foundation laid, so now we can just add on the different modalities that we choose," Ms. Foust-Cofield said. "Our goal is to move to ambient listening, so patients will be able to activate a call light [through speech], and the nurse can speak out loud and do all of their documentation. When I look at our nurses, my team spends, on average, about 153 minutes in the medical record a shift, which is insane." n

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