The Pulse
HCA Nurses Say Palantir Scheduling Tool Risks Patient Care
Nurses at HCA Healthcare say Timpani, a scheduling system co-developed with Palantir, overrides shift preferences and can leave units short of experienced staff. HCA says nursing leaders make final scheduling decisions and cites its own fig
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
HCA Healthcare says nursing leaders—not its scheduling software—make the final call on nurse shifts. Nurses interviewed by WIRED say the Palantir-powered system, Timpani, leaves them with unwanted assignments and can put too few experienced colleagues on a shift, raising concerns about patient care.
HCA began rolling out Timpani in 2023 and has deployed it at roughly 130 of its 190 locations, according to WIRED. The system uses forecasts of patient volume and staffing needs to generate schedules. Nurses say its recommendations have become difficult to challenge and that trading or appealing their shifts now takes more of their time than before the software arrived.
Amber Retzloff says her requests often go unanswered
Over four months, Florida critical care nurse Amber Retzloff requested 50 specific 12-hour shifts. She says Timpani assigned her to different shifts more than half the time, often scheduling her for three consecutive days. She told WIRED the system honored her preferences less often than managers did when they built schedules manually.
“We are overriding clinical judgment and the human-to-human piece of health care with an app.”
Amber Retzloff, critical care nurse in Florida, speaking to WIRED
Retzloff described shifts when she was the only senior nurse among four colleagues, requiring her to delay care for the sickest patients while helping newer nurses handle less serious cases. The nurses’ accounts describe potential risks; they do not establish that Timpani caused a specific patient injury.
HCA cites efficiency; nurses describe a different result
HCA spokesperson Harlow Sumerford said nursing leaders make the final scheduling decisions; assertions that the tool “is designed to reduce staffing at the expense of patient care” are misrepresentative, he added. He said HCA continues to improve Timpani using nurses’ feedback. The company’s position contrasts with nurses’ descriptions of schedules they say are hard to change and staffing mixes they consider unsafe.
In an article first published in the journal Management in Healthcare in June and republished by HCA on July 21, HCA Chief Transformation Officer Michael Schlosser said Timpani cuts scheduling work for managers and reduces reliance on contract nurses. He wrote that more than 98 percent of shifts include a mix of skill and experience levels and that departments using the tool “have also reported a 6% decline in turnover”; WIRED described the result only as increased retention.
Those figures are the company’s own reported results; they do not resolve nurses’ complaints about particular shifts or how often schedules match their requests.
Shift swaps and appeals add to the dispute
Nurses told WIRED they now appeal problematic assignments to a centralized HCA team in Nashville, rather than working through local managers who could previously make changes. When appeals fail, they try to trade shifts; nurses quoted in the report estimated that about half of those attempts succeed. Some also said colleagues call out more often to avoid assignments, though HCA nurses who miss more than a few shifts a year risk termination.
National Nurses United, which the report says represents about 10,000 of HCA’s 100,000 nurses, says HCA has rejected its requests for information about Timpani. A union representing roughly 500 nurses at an HCA psychiatric center filed a grievance over the system, arguing that HCA does not sufficiently honor scheduling preferences; the dispute is likely to go to arbitration. The central disagreement is concrete: HCA presents Timpani as a way to match staff skills to patient needs, while nurses say they are spending more time fixing schedules they believe can leave care teams unevenly experienced.