Healthcare & Life Sciences Executive. Physician-Scientist and Surgeon.
Chief Medical Officer, Cognizant · Aurora, Ohio
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.
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.
Selected work 01
On arrival, Schell founded Cognizant’s first Healthcare Advisory Board, convening provider and payvider executives around the industry’s most consequential operating questions. The board became a source of substantial new enterprise engagements across multiple health systems, converting senior-level dialogue into material client work. As CMO, he guides strategies, offerings, and operating models Cognizant brings to provider, payer, and life-sciences clients, applying clinical and scientific judgment where AI, data, operations, regulation, and financial reality meet.
UPMC’s population-health platform development had stalled. Recruited to reset the strategy and serve as recovery architect, Schell designed the new enterprise system and aligned the organizations required to build it: hundreds of people across product, technology, care delivery, the health plan, and executive administration, none reporting to him. The $120 million platform went live under budget, ahead of schedule, and through the pandemic.
Alere recruited Schell as a consultant to turn around its oncology care-management practice. Sixteen months later, he was EVP and CMO, leading 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. The work led directly to his recruitment by Cleveland Clinic.
Recruited from outside Cleveland Clinic’s leadership structure, Schell became Founding Chair of Population Health and Associate Chief of Staff as the organization repositioned for accountable care. The mandate required alignment across clinical leadership, finance, operations, population health, and reimbursement economics. He was brought in not to preserve the existing model, but to define the next one.
As global scientific advisor for Wyeth’s tigecycline program, Schell supervised, evaluated, and course-corrected international trials for the two indications ultimately approved by the FDA: community-acquired pneumonia and complicated intra-abdominal infection. Working with infectious-disease therapeutic-area lead Dr. Evan Loh, he helped coordinate a program run largely from the United Kingdom. Tigecycline reached the market, reflecting scientific and regulatory judgment applied at global scale.
Corroborated by the FDA approval record and peer-reviewed cIAI publicationsFor two decades, Schell ran Innovatim, an advisory and operating practice spanning more than 30 engagements across the United States, Europe, ASEAN, and South America. Clients included Pfizer, Merck, Novartis, Cubist, BK Ultrasound, i-Flow, Invuity, and firms across diagnostics, payer, and digital health. He also founded VersaChart, a cloud EMR licensed by Beaumont to run breast oncology when its Epic deployment fell years behind. VersaChart was later acquired.
Innovatim, Inc., Ohio Secretary of StateSelected thinking 02
Newsweek · Medical Economics · TechTarget · HIT Consultant · Healthcare IT Today · Healthcare Brew · Chief Healthcare Executive · Physicians Weekly
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.
The record 03
Executive & enterprise
Health-system leadership
Training & credentials
Board & governance