Over the past four months, Amber Retzloff, a critical care nurse in Florida, requested to work 50 specific 12-hour shifts. But over half the time, she says her hospital’s Palantir-powered scheduling software assigned her to different shifts, often putting her on back-to-back-to-back days and leaving her mentally drained. Retzloff doesn’t expect to always get the slots she wants, but by her count the tool does a far worse job honoring her preferences than managers did when they assigned shifts by hand.
Retzloff’s experience mirrors that of other nurses across HCA Healthcare, the largest hospital chain in the US. Since 2023, HCA has rolled out an AI scheduling tool it co-developed with Palantir called Timpani at roughly 130 of its 190 locations. Retzloff’s hospital adopted it nearly two years ago.
“No one is happy with Timpani,” says Retzloff, echoing what five nurses at other locations reported in interviews with WIRED. “Everyone complains all the time.” Other purported HCA workers have expressed similar gripes about the tool on platforms like Reddit.
The nurses who spoke with WIRED allege that Timpani has potentially harmed patients by causing care teams to be understaffed, imbalanced, and exhausted. Operating with minimal oversight, they say the tool routinely schedules too few nurses or not enough experienced veterans during shifts, particularly on Sundays. It also frequently ignores nurses’ stated preferences for spacing out shifts, working nights and weekends, or taking specific days off.
As a result, nurses say they are being forced to waste more time trying to trade shifts or appeal their schedules than prior to the arrival of the software. They also believe colleagues are increasingly calling out, using paid or unpaid time to skip assignments, though doing so more than a few times annually puts them at risk of termination.
If management can’t even schedule staff, then just fire them. It’s the most basic function of management
They probably did fire the managers that were doing the scheduling before. Hospitals in the US have been doing layoffs left and right, trying to figure out how to staff the fewest people while taking as many patients as possible. Part of it is greed, but a lot of it is cuts to healthcare spending by the Trump admin.
Which is also greed
If a healthcare system really cared about helping people they could easily offer fair prices to people paying out of pocket, and just not me with insurance at all. Patients can still submit bills to their insurer manually to get whatever they can covered, but the overall business model would probably be more profitable than what they do now, because instead of paying millions a year for employees that deal with pre auths and insurers, making contacts with insurers, etc you would just be dealing with providing healthcare.
People don’t realize just how much time, effort, and money healthcare organizations have to waste dealing with scummy insurance companies. Everyone from doctors, nurses, to entire departments that deal with pre auths, and the end result is that the hospital still gets huge amounts of denied claims, which is why they often charge 4-5x more than they need to for things, because they know they’ll only get paid about 20% of the time by insurance companies, which just ends up creating an escalating price race that hurts patients.
So just stop playing the game. Offer healthcare at a fair price, along with fair low to zero interest payment plans. If patients have insurance, give them all the documents they would need to submit the bills for their insurance, if they don’t, that’s fine because you’re not gouging the shit out of them.
Healthcare organizations don’t need to turn massive profits, they just need a sustainable business model that allows them to cover payroll, operating costs, supplies, and then have a bit left over to invest in growth.
They should all be non profit, tax exempt, and shouldn’t have to deal with insurance bullshit at all.
Management is making a mess of nurse’s schedules.
The insanity of arbitrary twelve-hour shifts did not start with a stupid chatbot.
Overworked and understaffed nursing, while healthcare companies make record profits, is fundamentally not a problem with the dartboard those assholes use to decide who gets screwed this week.
Yup. Not defending AI but it will definitely be used as a shitty excuse for shitty decisions. It’s the new “well, it’s corporate policy” veneer.
Targeting brainless C-suites with these “tools” is frankly a stroke of genius. Incredibly ironic that a hospital would try to remove the human element from their workplace. How hard is it really to have an experienced and generally liked nurse make the schedule for the nurses? Who’s money and time is this actually saving?
Alex Karp is twiddling his fingers and cackling maniacally at our suffering
