What We Know About HCA's Palantir Nurse Scheduling Tool

A Palantir-built scheduling tool called Timpani is drawing complaints from nurses at HCA Healthcare hospitals who say it mis-assigns shifts, understaffs units, and overrides their stated preferences, according to interviews conducted by WIRED. HCA, the largest hospital chain in the United States, says nursing leaders retain final say over schedules and disputes that the software is designed to cut staffing at patients' expense.

What is Timpani and where is it being used?

Timpani is an AI-powered scheduling tool that HCA co-developed with Palantir, the data-analytics company best known for government and defense contracts, WIRED reports. HCA began rolling it out in 2023 and has deployed it at roughly 130 of its 190 hospital locations since then. The tool is meant to automate the shift-assignment process that managers previously handled by hand.

What are nurses saying went wrong?

Amber Retzloff, a critical care nurse in Florida and a National Nurses United labor union leader with a decade of bedside experience, told WIRED that over the past four months she requested 50 specific 12-hour shifts and that Timpani failed to honor more than half of those requests. She said the software has instead scheduled her for back-to-back-to-back days that leave her "mentally drained."

"No one is happy with Timpani," Retzloff said. "Everyone complains all the time." Five other nurses at different HCA locations described similar frustrations to WIRED, and the outlet notes that purported HCA employees have raised comparable complaints on platforms such as Reddit.

Nurses interviewed by WIRED allege the tool routinely schedules too few nurses, or too few experienced staff, for particular shifts — a pattern they say is especially pronounced on Sundays. Retzloff recounted a recent shift in which all four of her colleagues were junior nurses, forcing her, as the lone senior nurse on duty, to delay care for the sickest patients while she walked less-experienced staff through milder cases.

"We are overriding clinical judgment and the human-to-human piece of health care with an app," Retzloff told WIRED, describing HCA as "letting AI dictate" staffing decisions.

How has the software changed day-to-day scheduling work?

Before Timpani, managers assigned shifts manually and, according to the nurses WIRED spoke with, generally consulted staff well in advance when their preferences could not be accommodated. Nurses say that under the new system, they often learn of mismatches or reassignments on shorter notice, requiring them to scramble to trade shifts or file appeals. A non-union nurse in Texas, who asked WIRED not to be named for fear of retaliation from HCA, contrasted the old process favorably: "I can't remember any issues before. Everything came out on time."

Nurses also told WIRED they believe colleagues are increasingly using paid or unpaid time off to avoid assignments generated by the tool — even though calling out more than a handful of times per year can put a nurse's job at risk under HCA policy.

What does HCA say in response?

Harlow Sumerford, an HCA spokesperson, told WIRED that nursing leaders — not the software — make the final scheduling calls, and that claims the tool is "designed to reduce staffing at the expense of patient care" are misrepresentative. Sumerford said HCA's objective is "to have the right caregivers, with the right skills and experience, available to meet the needs of our patients while also considering our colleagues'" preferences, according to the portion of his statement captured by WIRED.

The company's position, as described to WIRED, is that Timpani is a scheduling aid operating under human oversight rather than an autonomous system making unreviewed staffing decisions.

Why does this matter beyond one hospital chain?

HCA operates 190 hospitals nationwide, and roughly 130 of them are already running Timpani, per WIRED's reporting — meaning any systemic scheduling flaw would touch a large share of one of the country's biggest health systems at once. The dispute also sits inside a broader debate over how far AI should extend into frontline clinical operations: Retzloff's complaint is not that software exists, but that it is substituting for judgment calls nurses say used to involve direct, human negotiation between staff and managers.

WIRED's report does not include comment from Palantir itself, and the available source material does not specify whether HCA has made or plans to make changes to how Timpani weighs nurses' shift preferences. What is documented is a pattern: nurses at multiple locations, speaking with a national outlet, describing the same mismatch between requested and assigned shifts, and a hospital system defending the tool as a staffing aid rather than a staffing mandate.