Nurses warn Palantir tech will impact patient care in nation’s largest hospital system

National Nurses United (NNU), the largest union of registered nurses in the United States, is planning to protest outside the 2026 Frist Gala at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tenn. on April 18. The gala and museum are named for the family behind HCA Healthcare, the country’s largest hospital system. Nurses will be on site to provide gala attendees with informational flyers about HCA’s business with Palantir.

For years, nurses have protested outside the annual Frist Gala to raise alarms about cuts to staffing and services while the Frist family profits off patients’ suffering and ruthless monopolization tactics. This year, nurses’ warning is more urgent than ever: HCA is making hospital staffing decisions with new technology from Palantir, the notorious company behind massive data mining and surveillance operations for the U.S. Departments of Defense and Homeland Security.

Who: Union nurses, Nashville labor unions and community groups
What: Protest outside 2026 Frist Gala
When: Saturday, April 18, 5 p.m.
Where: On public sidewalks outside Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway, Nashville, Tenn.

“Our message is simple: Put patients first,” said Valerie Jean, RN in the float pool at HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital in Port Charlotte, Fla. “HCA is an industry leader because of its size, and right now, HCA management is leading the entire health care industry into untested AI rollouts and partnerships with companies like Palantir, which represents a threat to our patients, their privacy, and our entire democracy.”

“The Central Labor Council aims to raise the visibility of workers' needs as opposed to those of the wealthy, like the Frist family,” said Vonda McDaniel, president of the Central Labor Council of Nashville and Tennessee. “This year, it’s even more pressing with HCA partnering with Palantir. Our patient data should be protected.”

Nurses to HCA: Put patients first

“HCA is the poster child for cutting staffing and cutting services to squeeze every last penny out of a hospital,” added Jean. “They are ruthless, and so we know we can’t standby silently while they try to use A.I. to justify further staffing cuts. We know, through research and our own experience, that safe staffing already has a very simple solution: Hire more nurses and improve the bedside conditions. HCA has more than enough money to do that.” 

HCA hospitals have refused to provide further information to NNU nurses on the extent of the hospital giant’s cooperation with Palantir, including how patients’ and health care workers’ data are being protected. That lack of transparency only underscores the importance of demanding HCA purge Palantir from its technology.

Meanwhile, HCA reported record profits of $6.8 billion in 2025, helping balloon the Frist family’s net worth to over $41 billion with a single-year increase of $14 billion. HCA donates less than a dollar for every $100 in profit to charity, and the Frists report similarly minute charitable donations to events like the black-tie gala at the museum bearing their name.

NNU represents more than 225,000 nurses across the nation and advocates for workplace policies and legislation to improve the lives of nurses, patients, and communities everywhere. National Nurses Organizing Committee (NNOC), an affiliate of NNU, represents more than 10,000 nurses at 19 HCA hospitals in seven states from coast to coast.

Nurses say: Purge Palantir

Palantir’s influence in the health care industry is still developing, but a Palantir executive claimed that the company’s software was already managing 21% of U.S. hospital beds by August 2024. The firm’s technology is already being used for automated scheduling and staffing in hospitals through Timpani (otherwise known as HCA Inspire), a new app used for nursing staff scheduling, removing hospitals’ local managers from staffing decisions and replacing them with a centralized office in Nashville. 

Even these limited applications are already exacerbating the nationwide staffing crisis, as executives are rushing to use untested and unregulated technology to replace clinical judgement and make critical health care decisions like how many nurses are on a unit to take care of patients on a shift.

The federal government has awarded billions of dollars in contracts to Palantir. Founded by Peter Thiel and led by Alex Karp, both billionaires, Palantir’s data mining and surveillance tools centralize and organize massive amounts of data collected by the federal government, including Medicaid data, to enable ICE to target, stalk, detain, and deport immigrants.

From 2009 to 2025, Palantir received $2.5 billion in federal government funding, but this number has grown tremendously in just the past year. Last July, the Department of Defense announced a $10 billion agreement with Palantir to use its technology to share data across federal agencies, enabling unprecedented surveillance power. This followed a $30 million contract awarded to Palantir by the Department of Homeland Security to build an AI-powered system that would identify immigrants for deportation. In Feb. 2026, the Department of Homeland Security and Palantir signed a $1 billion contract.

In addition to working closely with the U.S. government, Palantir has also entered into partnership with Israel’s Ministry of Defense to support their “war effort” in Gaza which Israeli human rights organizations, the globe’s leading association of genocide scholars, and a United Nations Special Committee, among others, have concluded is a genocide. More than 1,500 health care workers, in addition to tens of thousands of innocent civilians, have been murdered in Gaza since Israeli forces invaded in October 2023.

National Nurses United is the largest and fastest-growing union and professional association of registered nurses in the United States with more than 225,000 members nationwide. NNU affiliates include California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, DC Nurses Association, Michigan Nurses Association, Minnesota Nurses Association, and New York State Nurses Association.