Tampa General Hospital leaders came together Wednesday to celebrate the opening of the organization’s new innovation center in Ybor City, as part of Innovation Week 2026.
The 32,000-square-foot facility, located in the Tampa Medical and Research District, will be a hub for TGH Ventures – the hospital’s corporate venture capital arm and innovation team. Additionally, it will be a collaborative space for TGH’s analytics and information technology departments. Tampa Medical & Research District offices will be located there as well.
Analytics company Palantir Technologies has opened a Tampa headquarters at the building. The hospital and Palantir first collaborated in 2021 when the health system began to use the organization’s Foundry software.
In 2024, TGH selected the company’s artificial intelligence platform to help create a connected care coordination system for patients.
“The center is focused on really exploring and trying to understand what the future of health care is going to look like for people that we serve and people across the country,” TGH president/CEO John Couris told the Catalyst. “It’s a place where like-minded people can come together to build new programs, new services and explore new technologies and innovations so that this work can be passed down to the consumer of health care.”
He added that the goal is to approve quality and clinical outcomes while lowering costs in a “sustainable and reproducible way.”
By implementing technologies such as artificial intelligence, nurses and doctors can spend more time at the bedside and focus on their patient, Couris explained. The center even has a “hospital room of the future” to demonstrate advancements. Additionally, it has a production studio to film content and host podcasts.
“It’s a place for physicians, researchers, allied health professionals, industry partners and entrepreneurs to move a great idea to a tested solution faster,” Scott Arnold, TGH executive vice president and chief digital and innovation officer, said at the Wednesday event.
“Innovation is a mindset. It’s part of our culture at Tampa General Hospital and it can’t be occasional. It has to be intentional, repeatable and connected to the real needs of the people we serve.”
The TGH team collaborated with real estate developer Casa Ybor and its CEO, Darryl Shaw, on the project. Formerly a furniture store warehouse, the building dates back to 1940. An original bank vault remains intact.
Couris explained that the hospital was created “by the community and for the community” as a public hospital in 1927 and eventually became a private not-for-profit health system in 1997.
“It’s important to be in Ybor City because the people are a big part of the community that supports TGH,” he said. “So, we feel that it is important to support the folks in Ybor that live here.”
ARK Invest founder and CEO Cathie Wood spoke Wednesday at the NEXT Summit as part of TGH Innovation Week. Wood relocated her investment management firm to St. Petersburg in 2021 and has backed incubator spARK Labs by ARK Invest (formerly known as the Tampa Bay Innovation Center).
“Cathie and I both believe in regionalism. We think we need to find ways to tie together the city of St. Pete with the city of Tampa,” Couris added. “When we are recruiting people from around the country and the world, they want to understand the region and we are more powerful together than we are apart.”
