Over the past decade, health systems turned to tech giants — including Microsoft, AWS and Google — to power their data infrastructure, analytics and AI initiatives. But one tech company that hasn’t appeared very much in healthcare headlines is Palantir. 

That may change soon, according to Scott Arnold, CIO and chief of innovation at Tampa General Hospital. During an interview this week at the ViVE conference in Nashville, he said he thinks Palantir is poised to have a significant impact on the healthcare sector.

Palantir — which was founded in 2003 by tech entrepreneurs Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen and Joe Lonsdale — specializes in software platforms that can analyze vast amounts of data. Arnold said that Cleveland Clinic and Tampa General are the company’s first two healthcare customers.

Palantir powers Tampa General’s analytics platform as well as its AI platform, he noted.

“The reason why we love [Palantir] is because, frankly, we can solve problems in hours and days instead of months and years — and we never used to be able to do that,” Arnold declared.

For instance, Tampa General’s blood supplier, OneBlood, was compromised by a cyberattack this past summer. This incident took the company offline briefly and rendered it temporarily unable to provide blood to hospitals. This was incredibly problematic, given Tampa General is a Level I trauma center that needs to have a lot of blood on hand. Within “a couple of hours,” Tampa General was able to use Palantir’s software to create a solution that organized data around what blood the hospital had on hand, where it needed to go and how to prioritize the blood based on its expiration, Arnold explained.

Tampa General then turned that prioritization app over to the state of Florida, he said.

“This was the blood supplier for the state of Florida. All of the other hospitals were kind of screaming at the state, ‘What do we do?’ We just handed them our prioritization app and said, ‘This is how we do it, and this might be how you should do it, and hopefully not much time will elapse before OneBlood figures out how to get back online.’ And they did, and everything was fine — but that could have been a disaster,” Arnold remarked.

In his opinion, health systems are becoming more innovative, and many are seeking a tech partner that can help them solve problems more quickly.

Basically, Arnold believes hospitals want to shorten the timeline from conception to deployment when it comes to new software and other digital health tools. And he thinks Palantir is the right tech partner to help meet those goals.

“Palantir comes with a premium, but it’s well worth the premium,” Arnold stated.

Instead of selling providers a product and wishing them good luck, Palantir connects its data scientists to clients so they can collaboratively help them resolve inefficiencies and bottlenecks, he explained.

Not only do Palantir’s data scientists work closely with the hospital to understand precisely what problem it is seeking to address, but they also move very quickly — all while turning out quality software, Arnold noted. He said this combination of characteristics is quite rare to find in a tech partner.

Photo: Yuichiro Chino, Getty Images