What Connection Actually Sells Into Health Systems
Connection is a Premier Sponsor of CHIME (College of Healthcare Information Management Executives) and runs a dedicated healthcare practice. Seven lines matter for a system the size of TGH — six hospitals, 150+ sites, and an innovation roadmap that keeps adding new edge locations and, now, whole new hospitals.
Connection doesn't have a single flagship product the way Epic is a flagship EHR — the closest thing it has is Healthcare-in-a-Box, the only piece of the practice with its own proper name rather than a category label. The identity underneath that: Connection sells and supports the infrastructure and lifecycle layer a hospital's clinical systems run on top of — devices, data center, managed operations, and security — not the clinical systems themselves. Worth holding onto with Dan specifically: Connection is TGH's infrastructure partner, not an Epic consulting firm, and the seven lines below are what that distinction actually looks like in practice.
Clinical InfrastructureRefresh & Managed Services
- Healthcare-in-a-Box — preconfigured, ready-to-deploy IT kits for opening or refreshing a clinical site, built to compress turn-up time.
- Managed Service Desk — outsourced device/app support, incident management, and escalation tuned to clinical environments.
- Healthcare IT staffing — contract technologists who already speak clinical workflow and regulatory language.
- 24×7 NOC — proactive monitoring built around uptime for patient-care systems.
Cybersecurity & ComplianceGovernance-Ready Security
- Compliance services spanning HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS.
- Security Landscape Optimization — a vulnerability-and-strategy assessment built to feed a risk register, not just produce a PDF.
- 24×7 threat detection and response powered by Cisco XDR, purpose-built for healthcare's IoT-heavy attack surface.
Clinical MobilityEndpoints Clinicians Actually Carry
- Integrated Apple–Cisco–PatientSafe–Jamf stack unifying secure device access with clinical communication.
- Zebra healthcare line — 300+ SKUs: rugged mobile computers, RFID, scanners, and card/badge printers (e.g., the ZC10L).
- OtterBox and UAG rugged cases across iPhone, iPad, Galaxy, and Surface — carried at the SKU level for fleet-wide standardization.
Physical SecurityCameras & Access
- Full camera catalog from Axis (410+ SKUs), Motorola (337+ SKUs), and Verkada — including AI-analytics models (aggression detection, forced-entry alerts, license-plate/vehicle recognition).
- Verkada access-control hardware (mullion readers, video intercoms) for unifying badge and camera events.
Data CenterModern Infrastructure & Consolidation
- A dedicated Modern Infrastructure & Data Center practice covering hyperconverged infrastructure — Nutanix and VMware, including Cisco Compute HCI on Nutanix — plus cross-platform virtualization visibility (SolarWinds Virtualization Manager across vSphere, Hyper-V, and Nutanix AHV).
- Disaster Recovery Design and DRaaS, plus Backup-as-a-Service — built for exactly the kind of newly-acquired-site consolidation TGH is mid-way through.
- Colocation reach through partner Expedient for capacity that doesn't need to be built in-house.
PowerUptime Under Florida Weather
- APC (Schneider Electric) — AI-ready data center power, from rack UPS to facility-scale.
- Eaton — BladeUPS, PDU G4 with removable cabling, and Intelligent Power Manager software for hypervisor-integrated power monitoring; Tripp Lite by Eaton for edge/branch sites.
- Runs seasonal storm-preparedness content — directly relevant to a Tampa Bay system's hurricane exposure.
LifecycleServer & Network Refresh
- Lifecycle and refresh services across the Dell, HPE, and Lenovo server lines — asset disposition, staged rollout, firmware/compliance baselining.
- Positioned to retire end-of-support hardware before it becomes an audit finding or a ransomware foothold.
What TGH Is Actually Building Right Now
TGH's leadership explicitly avoids long pilots — Chief Digital & Innovation Officer Scott Arnold's stated approach is to "test quickly and scale quickly." That posture is an opening: initiatives below are either already scaling past pilot or built to.
Live Pilot → ScalingWhole-Blood Drone Delivery
- First-in-the-nation EMS-driven drone program delivering whole blood to trauma scenes, flying from two Hillsborough County fire stations across a 70-square-mile service area, average delivery under three minutes.
- Built with Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, the Florida Center for EMS, OneBlood, and Archer First Response Systems (ArcherFRS) for drone logistics.
- Grew out of an earlier ArcherFRS partnership with Manatee County delivering emergency response equipment by drone — this is a program actively expanding its footprint, not a one-off demo.
Command CenterC3 / CareComm + Palantir + GE Healthcare
- CEO John Couris frames it as a "NASA-inspired" command center — the CareComm hub, relaunched as the TGH Care Coordination Center (C3), runs 24/7 on GE Healthcare infrastructure and Palantir's AI platform.
- Delivered roughly $40M in savings, eliminated ~20,000 excess patient-days, and cut average length of stay by half a day within its first two years.
- Expanded AI-enabled coordination is credited with a 3% reduction in sepsis mortality — close to 600 lives.
Surgical InnovationRobotics & Simulation
- Intuitive da Vinci 5 and the Symani microsurgery robotic system are both in active clinical use.
- USF's CAMLS center installed GE HealthCare's Allia Moveo — first in Florida, third in the world — with a second unit slated to land at TGH itself in 2026 for clinical use.
Growth / M&ATGH North — Three-Hospital Integration
- Completed a $294M acquisition of three Community Health Systems hospitals in December 2023 — Bravera Health Brooksville, Spring Hill, and Seven Rivers — renamed TGH Brooksville, TGH Spring Hill, and TGH Crystal River under a new "TGH North" division, plus a freestanding ED, two ambulatory surgery centers, and 10 clinics.
- CIO Scott Arnold projected a 12-month Epic EHR rollout across TGH North — until that cutover lands, each site runs on infrastructure TGH didn't build.
- TGH Crystal River sits in Citrus County — the same county TGH at Home expanded into in March 2026, suggesting overlapping regional build-out.
- Purchased 53 acres north of the region in October 2025, reportedly eyeing a future hospital — the footprint keeps growing, not just consolidating.
Care at the EdgeTGH at Home
- Hospital-at-home program running on a TytoCare-powered Virtual Health Kit — a cellular tablet plus vitals monitoring — since 2022, serving 2,500+ patients from the Davis Islands flagship.
- Expanded geographically to Citrus County in March 2026 — every new county is a new set of field devices, connectivity, and identity to secure.
The Snatch ransomware group operated inside TGH's network for roughly three weeks (May 18–30) before detection. TGH's monitoring stopped file encryption, but attackers still exfiltrated data on ~1.2 million patients (names, SSNs, medical record and account numbers, insurance details — the EMR itself was not reached). The breach lawsuit later settled for $6.8M. It's the incident CISO Jim Bowie now references publicly when he talks about cyber resilience and recovery rehearsal — and the direct reason Dan Holland's risk-quantification program exists.
Who's in the Room
Holland is the right first meeting — he's the working-level owner of vendor risk conversations — but real budget and technical execution eventually touch the names below too.
| Name | Role | What they optimize for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| John Couris | President & CEO | Public-facing "first in the nation" innovation narrative; sets the ambition, not the spec sheet. | /in/jcouris |
| Scott Arnold | EVP, Chief Digital & Innovation Officer | Owns IT, cybersecurity, analytics, biomedical device integration, and innovation end-to-end since 2010. Ultimate budget holder for anything transformational. Publicly averse to slow pilots. | /in/scott-arnold |
| Brian Hammond | SVP, IT Operations & CTO | 25+ years in IT, at TGH since 2011. Owns infrastructure and systems-integration strategy — managed the security team through TGH's Epic upgrade and the Palantir work behind C3's staffing and PACU-hold-time gains. 2020 Tampa Bay Business Journal CIO of the Year. The likely co-signer on anything infrastructure or data-center shaped. | /in/brian-hammond |
| Jim Bowie | VP & CISO | Rebuilt security for 18,000 users and 70,000 endpoints across 6 hospitals and 150+ sites. Talks to the C-suite in dollars, not CVEs. The gatekeeper on any AI rollout touching data permissions. | /in/james-b |
| Dan Holland | Deputy CISO | Built TGH's Cybersecurity Governance Council and its FAIR-based risk-quantification practice. Coast Guard Academy background; co-chairs the Tampa Bay FAIR Institute chapter. The working contact who takes the vendor meeting. | /in/danhollandarete |
| Ryan Poggenpohl | Director, Technology Integration & Clinical Engineering | Runs TGH's biomedical/clinical engineering department (three managers, four supervisors, ~30 technicians) — responsible for roughly 40,250 pieces of equipment across the main campus, the three TGH North hospitals, a behavioral hospital, a freestanding ED, and 150+ clinics. The named co-owner Topics 03 and 04 keep pointing to. | /in/ryan-poggenpohl |
Connection: Who's on Our Side
Starting with the rep running the account, then who she'd loop in, and when.
The RepLorie Tomlinson — Twenty Years In
Lorie's path runs through three stops before Connection: Tech Data, where she started in channel sales; Insight, in business development; and six years at Hewlett Packard Enterprise — first as a Business Partner & Manager, then Enterprise Account Manager — before joining Connection on January 1, 2026.
That HPE stretch is the headline. Six years there ran through storage — arguably the single most competitive category in enterprise IT, with Dell, NetApp, Pure, Hitachi, and HPE's own Alletra/3PAR lines all fighting for the same rack space — which means Lorie isn't reciting a spec sheet on Topics 06, 10, 11, and 12, she's closed deals against every major name in that category. The same tenure built real depth in server and disaster recovery/backup, and in Aruba, HPE's networking division — network access control, wireless/wired backbone, and device segmentation carry that weight into Topics 03, 07, and 08.
TGH is effectively her first major healthcare engagement at Connection — she's arriving with the vendor-side depth already built, not building it on this account.
| Name | Role | Background | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mickey Bland | President, Enterprise Solutions Group | Joined Connection in Nov. 2022 after ~24 years at Insight Enterprises, most recently SVP & GM of Major Accounts and Global Sales. Reports directly to CEO Tim McGrath — the executive sponsor sitting above the healthcare practice. | /in/mickey-bland |
| Jennifer Johnson, CDH-L | Sr. Director, Healthcare Strategy & Business Development | At Connection since 2010, in the healthcare practice since 2015. CHIME Certified Digital Health Leader; NVIDIA AI Advisor and Dell AI Champion certified; named a CRN Women of the Channel in 2023 and 2024. The practice's lead strategist — bring her in for an executive-level healthcare conversation. | /in/jennifer-johnson-cdh-l |
| Kelly Kempf, CDH-P | Healthcare Strategy Manager | At Connection since 2013; previously at Express Scripts. Runs healthcare go-to-market strategy, vendor engagement, and internal healthcare sales training — the person who'd help scope and staff a multi-topic deal like this one. | /in/kelly-kempf-cdh-p |
Thirteen Conversations With Dan Holland
Written as one continuous discovery call, broken into thirteen movements. Each opens with why it lands specifically at TGH, then a rehearsal script — not real quotes from either person, built from public information about the account.
Ransomware Resilience & Recovery Rehearsal
The Snatch actors sat inside TGH's network for three weeks before detection in 2023. Bowie now cites that dwell time on cyber-resilience panels as the case for disciplined rehearsal. That's a direct opening for managed detection that shortens dwell time, and for a tabletop exercise Holland can run without pulling his own team off other work.
Scaling FAIR-Based Risk Quantification
Holland built TGH's FAIR practice himself — this is his program, not a vendor's. The honest opening isn't to sell him a new framework, it's to ask what's slowing down the one he already runs: usually stale asset and vulnerability data feeding the loss-exposure model by hand.
Medical Device & IoMT Visibility
70,000 endpoints across six hospitals and 150+ sites is largely a biomedical-device problem, and biomedical integration sits in Scott Arnold's org, adjacent to Holland's. It's the natural next question after "legacy systems EDR can't reach."
Robotic Surgery & Surgical Simulation Infrastructure
Da Vinci 5 and the Symani microsurgery system are both live in TGH's ORs — network-connected robotic platforms that can't tolerate latency or downtime mid-procedure. Meanwhile, GE's Allia Moveo simulator — already running at USF's CAMLS as the first installation in Florida — has a second unit confirmed landing on TGH's own campus in 2026 for clinical use. That's a dated, near-term infrastructure trigger: a high-fidelity simulator throws off real compute and storage load the moment it's plugged in.
AI Governance Ahead of the Next Copilot / Palantir Push
Bowie has publicly described asking for two weeks to lock down permissions before Copilot went live, because it inherits whatever a user has already over-shared. As C3's Palantir footprint keeps expanding, that's a recurring need, not a one-time fix — and Connection can pre-package the audit instead of it eating two weeks of Holland's team every time.
C3 Command Center Infrastructure Backbone
C3's numbers — $40M in savings, a real dent in sepsis mortality — are a production system making live decisions for six hospitals, not a pilot. As Palantir's data sources keep expanding under it (the same growth driving Topic 05's permissions problem), the network and compute underneath has to scale too, or it becomes the ceiling on the next win. And a room directing patient flow for the whole system 24/7 deserves the same badge and camera discipline as anywhere else sensitive.
AI-Powered Cameras & Workplace Violence Prevention
TGH is a Level 1 trauma center — the acuity that makes the ED a magnet for workplace violence is the same acuity that makes it a flagship trauma program. AI camera analytics (aggression detection, forced-entry alerts) is a safety story that also happens to be a Connection catalog with 700+ camera SKUs already carried.
Badge & Access Credentialing Across 150+ Sites
Six hospitals, 150+ sites, and Citrus County just added another one in March — every new site means new badge issuance and new clinician logon friction. Tap-and-go badge SSO at clinical workstations is the single most direct answer to "streamlining processes" for the people actually doing the work.
Securing the Whole-Blood Drone Network
The whole-blood delivery program isn't TGH's first drone project — it's the second phase of an ArcherFRS partnership that started with Manatee County emergency-equipment deliveries, so it's already proven and actively scaling, not an experiment. That also makes it brand-new edge infrastructure outside the hospital's four walls: unattended dock stations, field tablets, a live dispatch link, and a cold chain for blood in flight — running over cellular, in a hurricane market. Nobody's pitched this yet because the program itself is only weeks old.
Storm-Ready Power for Mission-Critical Systems
A 24/7 AI command center, EHR, PACS, and now drone dock stations all need power that survives a Tampa Bay hurricane season. Connection literally publishes storm-season UPS content — this is home turf, not a stretch.
Data Center Consolidation for the TGH North Integration
The three Community Health Systems hospitals TGH picked up in the $294M TGH North deal are mid-way through a 12-month Epic rollout — until that cutover finishes, each site is running on infrastructure TGH didn't build, on networks now joined to Holland's. It's also quietly a data center capacity decision: consolidate into TGH's core, stand up new capacity, or run hybrid in the meantime. With TGH also sitting on 53 fresh acres for a possible new hospital, this isn't a one-time cleanup — it's the shape of how TGH grows.
Server & Network Refresh to Retire EOL Risk
Fast geographic growth plus six hospitals means aging, unsupported servers and switches are quietly accumulating somewhere in the estate — the kind of thing that turns into both a compliance finding and a ransomware foothold at once.
Durable Clinical & Field Mobility Fleet
TGH at Home's TytoCare tablets travel into patients' homes; EMS and drone-program field tablets travel to trauma scenes. Every device outside a controlled building needs a case that survives a drop, and a lifecycle program that doesn't leave a clinician holding a broken tablet mid-visit.
The Close
Leave with one committed next step, not thirteen open threads.
- This week: Send Dan a one-page tabletop scope (legacy-system ransomware scenario) — low-friction, no PO required.
- On tabletop success: Propose the Security Landscape Optimization assessment, framed as feeding his existing FAIR model.
- Parallel track: Leave one-pagers on cameras, badge/access, the C3 capacity assessment, the drone-network security mapping, storm power, server refresh, and field mobility — sized for whenever budget cycles open.
- Joint-owner track: Scope the biomedical-device and OR/surgical-simulation work with Ryan Poggenpohl named on it, and the TGH North data center consolidation with Scott's infrastructure lead — nothing stalls on ambiguous ownership.
- Escalation: Bring Jim Bowie in once the tabletop or the risk-quant proposal has real scope attached — not before.
Sources
- Connection — Healthcare Technology
- Connection — Healthcare Managed Services
- Connection — Clinical Communications & Collaboration
- Connection — Cybersecurity Services
- Connection — Mobility & Security in Healthcare
- Connection — Zebra Healthcare Solutions
- Connection — Modern Infrastructure & Data Center Solutions
- Connection — Disaster Recovery Services
- Connection — Nutanix Showcase
- Connection — VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure
- Connection — APC Product Showcase
- Connection IR — Mickey Bland Joins as President, Enterprise Solutions
- Connected (Connection Blog) — Jennifer Johnson Author Page
- Connected (Connection Blog) — Kelly Kempf Author Page
- Connection — Storm Season UPS Prep
- TGH — Whole-Blood Drone Delivery Program
- TGH / Manatee County / ArcherFRS — Emergency Equipment Drone Program
- Becker's — TGH's NASA-Inspired Command Center
- TGH — Care Coordination Center (C3)
- HealthLeaders — $40M in AI-Driven Savings
- Healthcare IT News — ~600 Lives Saved
- TGH — da Vinci 5 Surgical System
- TGH / USF / GE HealthCare — Allia Moveo Surgical Training
- TGH — Hospital at Home Program
- TGH — Hospital at Home, Citrus County Expansion
- TGH — Completes Bravera/CHS Acquisition, Introduces TGH North
- Healthcare Dive — CHS Sells Three Florida Hospitals to TGH ($294M)
- Becker's — TGH to Install Epic at 3 Acquired Hospitals
- Business Observer — TGH Purchases 53-Acre Property, Eyes New Hospital
- HIPAA Journal — TGH Data Breach Settlement ($6.8M)
- Becker's — How TGH Thwarted the Ransomware Attack
- Cybersecurity Dive — TGH's Cyber Risk Quantification
- This Week Health — CISO James Bowie Interview
- FAIR Institute — Dan Holland, Tampa Chapter Co-Lead
- TGH Leadership — Scott Arnold Biography
- TGH — Brian Hammond Named 2020 CIO of the Year
- Palantir Blog — Connected Health Systems at Tampa General (Brian Hammond)
- TechNation — TGH Clinical Engineering Department of the Month (Ryan Poggenpohl)
- AHA — How TGH Accelerates AI Adoption