National Nurses United Launches 'Purge Palantir' Campaign Against HCA at Frist Gala, Escalates to Eight-City Civil Disobedience by August

April 18, 2026 (action date; press release 2026-04-13): National Nurses United (NNU) began a public campaign against HCA Healthcare’s use of Palantir-built scheduling technology, protesting outside the Frist Gala at the Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway, Nashville, at 6 p.m. — timed to the gala’s naming after the Frist family, which built HCA. Named speaker Valerie Jean, RN (float pool, HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital, Port Charlotte, Florida) and Vonda McDaniel, president of the Central Labor Council of Nashville and Middle Tennessee, addressed the protest. NNU’s demand: HCA “purge Palantir” from its technology systems. The release specifically names Timpani (also “HCA Inspire”), describing it as a centralized nursing-staff scheduling app that “removes local manager involvement” in staffing decisions, moving that authority to a Nashville office — see 2023-01-01–hca-timpani-palantir-nurse-scheduling-deployment for the deployment itself. NNU’s release also cites Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar’s August 2024 claim that Palantir’s software manages 21% of US hospital beds.

August 27, 2026 (action date; press release same day): The campaign escalated to coordinated civil disobedience across eight cities — Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., Portland (Maine), Asheville (North Carolina), Austin, and New Orleans — under the slogan “Palantir Out!”, with nurses joined by patients and community allies stopping traffic. NNU described it as the union’s largest coordinated action against Palantir to date. Named speakers: Jamie Brown, RN, NNU President; plus organizers from the American Friends Service Committee (Kenny Morris), CodePink (Olivia DiNucci), Mijente (Cathy Carrillo), Jewish Voice for Peace (Dani Noble), and the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (Fatima Mohammadi). The release’s central demand: hospitals and elected officials must immediately cut ties with Palantir. It names MaineHealth as another NNU-represented hospital system using Palantir technology, “with details undisclosed” — a lead not investigated further in this pass. Participant counts and any arrest figures were not specified in NNU’s own release.

What the campaign is actually objecting to

Per NNU’s own framing, the core objection is not primarily data privacy — it is that an algorithmic scheduling tool displaces the clinical judgment local nurse managers previously exercised over staffing. This is a labor story inside a data story: the same corpus that documents Palantir’s ICE and federal-surveillance footprint here shows a private-sector deployment where the harm alleged is displacement of professional judgment, not (as far as NNU’s own releases establish) a data-privacy breach.

HCA’s response

HCA disputes the characterization that review by nurse leaders is not meaningful. Per Healthcare IT News’s reporting, HCA “countered by arguing Timpani uses employee preferences, competencies, scheduling rules and other inputs to generate possible schedules, which nurse leaders can review and edit,” and said frontline employees helped design the platform and continue to inform its development. A spokesperson for HCA-owned Mission Health (Asheville, NC — one of the hospitals named in NNU material) said scheduling technology “is used to reduce administrative work and help nursing leaders accommodate nurses’ scheduling preferences.” The dispute is over whether nurse-leader review is meaningful in practice, not over whether it exists at all — both accounts describe the same review step and disagree about its substance.

Related entries

• 2023-01-01–hca-timpani-palantir-nurse-scheduling-deployment — the deployment this campaign targets.
• 2026-03-16–nyc-health-hospitals-katz-discloses-palantir-non-renewal-absolute-firewall-claim — a separate Palantir healthcare relationship (public hospital system, Medicaid billing); not the same customer, product, or question as HCA/Timpani.
• procurement-deep-dive-palantir-hca-healthcare-contract-and-the-one-in-five-americans-denominator — full sourcing chain on the Sankar 21%-of-beds figure NNU cites.

Research gaps

• MaineHealth’s Palantir relationship is named by NNU as a lead (“details undisclosed”) and was not independently investigated in this pass.
• Participant counts and any arrest figures for the August 27 actions were not specified in NNU’s own release and were not found elsewhere in this pass.
• Healthcare IT News, the source for HCA’s direct response quote, was reached only via search-result extract; direct fetch was blocked (HTTP 403). A browser-capable pass should verify directly.
• Whether the campaign has continued or escalated further after August 27, 2026 was not checked past the ticket’s instantiation date (2026-09-17).