Healthcare & Life Sciences Executive. Physician-Scientist and Surgeon.
Chief Medical Officer, Cognizant · Aurora, Ohio
Healthcare's most expensive failures often occur at the same seam: where a strategy that appeared sound in the boardroom meets the clinical, regulatory, financial, and operational reality in which it must work. Every technology cycle exposes that gap, and today AI is its most consequential expression. The investments are substantial, the effects reach across the enterprise, and few leaders have worked in all the environments where those decisions take effect.
Scott Schell has. He has built clinical, cancer, and population-health programs inside major health systems; led a national care-management business through acquisition and a molecular-diagnostics company through recapitalization and turnaround; advised pharma and medtech companies on bringing products through trials and regulation; and turned emerging technology into operating models that survive contact with clinical, operational, and financial reality. That work spans the bench, the bedside, the boardroom, and the payer, regulatory, and capital structures that shape healthcare.
He works across healthcare's clinical, scientific, commercial, and technical boundaries to test consequential strategies against the realities that determine whether they will scale, and to align the people, decisions, and operating models needed to build what works, redirect what does not, and act before failure becomes expensive.
Where I create value
Scott R. Schell helps healthcare and life-sciences enterprises make consequential decisions hold: whether an AI or data strategy will survive clinical reality, whether a transformation will scale or stall, whether a diagnostic or care-management business is built to last or to sell. He has led organizations serving 15 million lives, delivered a $120M enterprise platform under budget, and turned a failing care-management business into an acquisition by UnitedHealth.
Selected work 01
On arrival, Schell founded Cognizant's first Healthcare Advisory Board, convening provider and payvider executive leadership, which generated new enterprise engagements across multiple health systems. As Chief Medical Officer, he shapes the strategies, offerings, and operating models the firm brings to provider, payer, and life-sciences clients, bringing clinical and scientific judgment into how AI and data are adopted, how clinical operations are designed, and how partnerships and high-stakes client decisions are structured, so that enterprise ambition survives contact with clinical, regulatory, and financial reality.
UPMC's HealthPlaNET population-health platform had stalled. Schell was recruited as its recovery architect and operating leader, and the distinction matters: he did not deliver one piece of a working plan, he designed the enterprise system and aligned the organizations that had to build it, directing hundreds of people across product, technology, care delivery, the health plan, and executive administration without owning their reporting lines. The $120M trans-enterprise platform was delivered under budget and ahead of schedule, through the pandemic, extending analytics from the health plan into provider operations. The work shows he can recover a stalled enterprise build, architect what replaces it, and align an organization to deliver at scale.
Alere's care-management business was stagnating when Schell joined as an oncology consultant. Within sixteen months, he was EVP and Chief Medical Officer, leading roughly 2,400 people across an operation serving 15 million lives. He reorganized the business, rebuilt its predictive-modeling and data-science capabilities, and prepared it for acquisition by UnitedHealth Group. The work led directly to his recruitment as Cleveland Clinic's Founding Chair of Population Health. The sequence matters: repair the business, create value, then be entrusted with the next enterprise mandate.
Although already on the surgical staff, Schell was recruited from outside Cleveland Clinic's executive leadership structure to become Founding Chair of Population Health and Associate Chief of Staff as the organization repositioned for accountable care. The mandate required translation across clinical leadership, finance, operations, population health, and changing reimbursement economics. He was not brought in to preserve an existing model, but to help define the next one. The role connects his payer experience to health-system strategy and demonstrates his ability to lead across institutional boundaries.
Wyeth's tigecycline program required scientific oversight across a complex international development effort. As global scientific advisor, working with Dr. Evan Loh, the company's infectious-disease therapeutic-area lead, Schell supervised, evaluated, and course-corrected trials for the two indications ultimately approved: community-acquired pneumonia and complicated intra-abdominal infection. Much of the international program was coordinated from the United Kingdom. Tigecycline reached the market. The work demonstrates scientific and regulatory judgment applied at global scale, where approval was the measure of success.
Corroborated by the FDA approval record and peer-reviewed cIAI publicationsFor more than two decades, Schell ran Innovatim as a standing advisory and operating practice, completing more than thirty engagements across the United States, Europe, ASEAN, and South America. Clients included Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, Cubist, BK Ultrasound, i-Flow, Invuity, and organizations across diagnostics, payer, and digital health. The work ranged from product development and clinical evidence to strategy, operating models, regulatory fulfillment, and market entry. Among its portfolio companies was VersaChart, a fully cloud-based EMR he founded for procedure-based practices; when Beaumont's Epic deployment ran years behind, the health system licensed VersaChart to run its breast oncology program, and the company was later acquired. Innovatim is the clearest proof that his cross-sector range was practiced repeatedly, across markets and under consequence.
Innovatim, Inc., Ohio Secretary of StateSelected thinking 02
Keynote, DIA Global Annual Meeting 2025 (The Precision Paradox). Panels: U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Kaiser Permanente CMO Conference, Newsweek AI & Healthcare Summit. And 30+ additional bylined placements across national healthcare and technology media, 2024 to present.
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Executive & enterprise
Health-system leadership
Training & credentials
Board & governance