How Palantir is helping hospitals with tasks that used to require spreadsheets and whiteboards

Published

2 years ago

June 17, 2023

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The Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., on Saturday, Nov. 14, 2020. On Sunday, the Ohio Department of Health reported a total of 298,096 cases in Ohio since the pandemic began, leading to 5,722 deaths and 22,265 hospitalizations. Photographer: Dustin Franz/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Earlier this spring, the emergency department at the Cleveland Clinic told Dr. Rita Pappas it had a problem.

The Cleveland Clinic is the largest hospital system in Ohio, but after an influx of patients came in, the emergency department did not believe it could accommodate all the people who would need care.

Pappas, the Cleveland Clinic’s medical director for the admission and transfer center, disagreed.

The Cleveland Clinic was in the midst of trying new AI-powered software from Palantir. The system was predicting that there would be a large number of discharges that day, meaning there would be enough space for all the incoming patients.

Pappas and her team convinced the emergency department to give Palantir’s platform a chance, and — to her relief — the new system worked.

“It was perfect. We were able to accommodate all the patients, and so everyone was cheering, they were so happy,” Pappas, who also practices clinically as a pediatric hospitalist, told CNBC in an interview. “Everyone got really excited. I was very excited because I do not want to have the emergency department yelling at me.”

Ordinarily, Pappas said managing patient flow in a similar scenario would require constant communication, every hour throughout the night. But by accurately predicting patient discharges, Palantir’s system saved Pappas, her team and the emergency department a lot of time and effort.

Palantir partnered with two health-care systems, Cleveland Clinic and Tampa General Hospital in Florida, during the summer of 2021 to develop software called Palantir for Hospital Operations. Now, just two years later, the company says its hospital-operations platform accounts for around 10% of its commercial revenue in the U.S.

The software translates complex data into digestible information that health-care workers can use to guide their decision-making and resource allocation. It can be used to generate real-time and predictive insights into areas like staffing, wait times and hospital-bed assignments.

Shyam Sankar, the company’s chief technology officer, said he thinks Palantir for Hospital Operations is just getting started.

“I’m so excited that we’re at 13% of beds in the U.S., but you know, like 90% of the work is in front of us here,” Sankar told CNBC in an interview.

A race against the clock

Palantir specializes in data analytics, and shares of the company are up around 150% so far this year as bullish AI investors are buying into its tech offerings. The company reported its first quarterly net profit for Q4 2022, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp said in a May letter to shareholders that the company expects to remain profitable “each quarter through the end of the year,” and that demand for its new Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) is “without precedent.”

The company is perhaps best known for its work with the U.S. government’s defense and intelligence agencies, but despite its high-profile customers in government, Sankar said Palantir works to tackle hard challenges across a variety of industries, including health care — a field that experts widely believe is in crisis.

Hospital360 within Palantir for Hospital Operations

Palantir

Nurses and physicians are experiencing high levels of burnout, and staffing shortages across the country have made it difficult for hospital systems to keep up with patient demand. These challenges were magnified by the Covid pandemic, as nearly 63% of physicians reported symptoms of burnout in 2021, up from 38% the prior year, according to a recent study co-authored by the American Medical Association.

Companies across the medical and technology fields have been working to build solutions that could bring health-care workers some relief. But unless the new platforms, tools and services can be easily integrated into workflows, physicians and nurses often find they can be more trouble than they’re worth.

“If you don’t build it in the workflow of the user, it actually doesn’t get used, it just sits on the shelf,” Dr. Peggy Duggan, executive vice president and chief medical officer of Tampa General, told CNBC in an interview.

As such, in the summer of 2021, a team of four Palantir employees set out to create a meaningful solution that health-care workers at Cleveland Clinic and Tampa General could actually use. It was a daunting challenge, and there was an additional catch: They were only given a matter of weeks to build something worthwhile.

Drew Goldstein and Jeremy David, co-heads of health care at Palantir

Courtesy: Palantir

Drew Goldstein and Jeremy David led Palantir’s team of four, and they now run its fast-growing U.S. commercial health-care team. The pair said they were given around 12 weeks to build a solution for Tampa General, and their work in Florida was already underway when the Cleveland Clinic’s chief information officer called to give them an even shorter timeline: eight weeks.

“For better or for worse, I’m quite hopeful and optimistic,” David said in an interview with CNBC. “I was like, ‘Eight weeks? We can get something live in three.'”

David, Goldstein and their two teammates took an intense, hands-on approach to building their hospital-operations software.

They spent their allotted time on the ground in the hospitals in both Ohio and Florida, shadowing doctors and nurses during their shifts, even overnight. They asked questions about existing workflows and tried to grasp the biggest pain points for each organization, an experience Goldstein said was both “overwhelming” and “exciting.”

To their surprise, the Palantir team learned that hospital staff were carrying out some of their operations by manually entering data into spreadsheets and configuring information like scheduling on paper and whiteboards.

The Palantir team also became acquainted with whiteboards, as Goldstein said much of their early efforts in Ohio were spent trying to draw out existing workflows with hospital-operations leadership.

“It was so foundational in our understanding of what these problems could look like,” Goldstein told CNBC in an interview.

At the Cleveland Clinic, the Palantir team initially focused on addressing challenges related to patient flow, particularly around accelerating aspects of the patient-discharge process, while they trained their focus on clinical-staffing allocation at Tampa General. But before long, Goldstein said it became clear the health systems shared both of those problems.

“So then, instead of just building these completely separately, we started to think about, like, what should the product look like to be able to solve this?” Goldstein said.

When their work was done in Florida and Ohio, Palantir’s team had what amounted to an early iteration of Palantir for Hospital Operations. David said it was the product of several 100-hour weeks where he and Goldstein, who have become good friends, often lived in adjoining hotel rooms.

“Drew didn’t like that,” David joked. “[I’d] knock on his door, ‘Good morning, Sunshine!'”

David said the team’s hands-on approach was essential in order to understand what support health-care workers truly needed.

“If you treat the nurses and patients like widgets, you’re going to lose,” David said. “For about two weeks, we tried to treat them like widgets, and we lost.”

The group presented their work to hospital leadership through a series of demos and testimonials, and David said it was clear the health systems believed Palantir had created something special.

Their next challenge, Goldstein said, was to keep building and execute on a broader, longer-term vision.

A new tool for hospital staff: ‘They love it’

The Cleveland Clinic officially launched Palantir’s platform in March.

Pappas said the hospital system had considered working with other companies, but that the Palantir team stood out because they truly listened to the staff’s needs.

She said the Cleveland Clinic wanted help building a system that could optimize the number of patients staff could see, while also ensuring that they were all being cared for safely. Pappas said Palantir’s engineers not only took their concerns seriously but got psyched when they were able to build successful solutions.

“It sounds silly, but everyone had this, ‘Oh, we did it!’ moment,” she said.

As the medical director for the admission and transfer center, Pappas works with a bed-management team to place patients throughout the hospital. Prior to using Palantir’s platform, they relied on Microsoft Teams and Excel spreadsheets to carry out their operations.

Now, Pappas said they have easy access to both real-time and predictive insights on the number of patients coming into the hospital’s operating rooms, emergency department and as direct admissions, which are patients who receive treatments like chemotherapy.

“The system is actually learning and taking information, and it’s very accurate,” she said. “It serves as a command center so that we can see very clearly how many patients we are going to be caring for every day.”

Since the official launch of Palantir’s software on March 1, the Cleveland Clinic main campus has been able to accept an 8% increase in patient transfers from other hospitals.

In fact, Palantir’s system proved to be so useful that Pappas said some members of her team expressed fear that they were going to be replaced by it. Once she reassured them that the platform is just meant to serve as a tool, she said they’ve grown to love it.

“They’ve developed a trust in the system,” Pappas said. “People in health care are kind of conservative, you know, don’t like change, and so the fact that they trusted and are using it now really just says to us that it’s a successful venture for us.”

Schedule review within Palantir for Hospital Operations

Palantir

Duggan said staff at Tampa General, particularly nurses, are also very fond of Palantir’s technology. She acknowledged that it is still the “early days” of the partnership, but the software company passed its first test by building a staffing model that nursing managers can use to find team members who are available for shifts. Duggan said this process is often conducted manually, so automating it has saved Tampa General’s staff significant time and energy.

“The nurse leaders love it,” she said. “It’s right in their workflow; it makes their day easier and they love it. They love all that technology support.”

Duggan said once the Palantir team managed to solve the staffing problem, it was clear the company would be able to use its software to tackle challenges across several different areas of the hospital. Palantir is now working on a series of projects at Tampa General, and Duggan said she is particularly impressed by how it is helping clinicians handle cases of sepsis, the No. 1 killer in hospitals nationwide.

Sepsis occurs when a patient’s body has an extreme response to an infection. Once diagnosed, Duggan said patients have to stay on a pathway of treatment over the next few days in order to increase chances of survival.

Palantir built a monitoring system for the sepsis pathway at Tampa General, which helps the clinicians ensure the patients are getting the care they need. She said it can also help provide insights as to why a patient might not have received antibiotics, for instance.

Duggan said it is new but exciting territory, and it has allowed Tampa General to identify variability in some of its most important work.

“Our work in sepsis definitely has decreased early mortality by about half, and so that’s real lifesaving,” she said. “I tell people that it’s people’s mothers, sisters, cousins, right? That’s real lifesaving for sure.”

Meanwhile, Palantir’s commercial health-care team has ballooned from four employees to more than 50, and Goldstein said the rapid growth has been unexpectedly challenging to learn to manage.

But as they plan to partner with more health systems, expand their own team and continue to refine their technology in the years ahead, David said the potential for innovation makes for a truly exciting time.

“I think we really solved this core problem, where it’s like, OK, a health system actually can deploy this really transformative platform technology to the front lines of health care,” he said. “There’s this old trope that’s like banks and hospitals don’t adopt technology — that is definitively not true anymore.”

Technology

Why Meta had to ‘bend the knee to Trump’ ahead of his inauguration

Published

7 hours ago

January 11, 2025

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Why Meta had to 'bend the knee to Trump' ahead of his inauguration

Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week that Meta would pivot its moderation policies to allow more “free expression” was widely viewed as the company’s latest effort to appease President-elect Donald Trump.

More than any of its Silicon Valley peers, Meta has taken numerous public steps to make amends with Trump since his election victory in November.

That follows a highly contentious four years between the two during Trump’s first term in office, which ended with Facebook — similar to other social media companies — banning Trump from its platform.

As recently as March, Trump was using his preferred nickname of “Zuckerschmuck” when talking about Meta’s CEO and declaring that Facebook was an “enemy of the people.”

With Meta now positioning itself to be a key player in artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg recognizes the need for White House support as his company builds data centers and pursues policies that will allow it to fulfill its lofty ambitions, according to people familiar with the company’s plans who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter.

“Even though Facebook is as powerful as it is, it still had to bend the knee to Trump,” said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president, who left the company in 2020.

Meta declined to comment for this article.

In Tuesday’s announcement, Zuckerberg said Meta will end third-party fact-checking, remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender identity and bring political content back to users’ feeds. Zuckerberg pitched the sweeping policy changes as key to stabilizing Meta’s content-moderation apparatus, which he said had “reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship.”

The policy change was the latest strategic shift Meta has taken to buddy up with Trump and Republicans since Election Day.

A day earlier, Meta announced that UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime Trump friend, is joining the company’s board.

And last week, Meta announced that it was replacing Nick Clegg, its president of global affairs, with Joel Kaplan, who had been the company’s policy vice president. Clegg previously had a career in British politics with the Liberal Democrats party, including as a deputy prime minister, while Kaplan was a White House deputy chief of staff under former President George W. Bush.

Kaplan, who joined Meta in 2011 when it was still known as Facebook, has longstanding ties to the Republican Party and once worked as a law clerk for the late conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In December, Kaplan posted photos on Facebook of himself with Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump during their visit to the New York Stock Exchange.

Joel Kaplan, Facebook’s vice president of global policy, on April 17, 2018.

Niall Carson | PA Images | Getty Images

Many Meta employees criticized the policy change internally, with some saying the company is absolving itself of its responsibility to create a safe platform. Current and former employees also expressed concern that marginalized communities could face more online abuse due to the new policy, which is set to take effect over the coming weeks.

Despite the backlash from employees, people familiar with the company’s thinking said Meta is more willing to make these kinds of moves after laying off 21,000 employees, or nearly a quarter of its workforce, in 2022 and 2023.

Those cuts affected much of Meta’s civic integrity and trust and safety teams. The civic integrity group was the closest thing the company had to a white-collar union, with members willing to push back against certain policy decisions, former employees said. Since the job cuts, Zuckerberg faces less friction when making broad policy changes, the people said.

Zuckerberg’s overtures to Trump began in the months leading up to the election.

Following the first assassination attempt on Trump in July, Zuckerberg called the photo of Trump raising his fist with blood running down his face “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

A month later, Zuckerberg penned a letter to the House Judiciary Committee alleging that the Biden administration had pressured Meta’s teams to censor certain Covid-19 content.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” he wrote.

After Trump’s presidential victory, Zuckerberg joined several other technology executives who visited the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Meta also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

On Friday, Meta revealed to its workforce in a memo obtained by CNBC that it intends to shutter several internal programs related to diversity and inclusion in its hiring process, representing another Trump-friendly move.

The previous day, some details of the company’s new relaxed content-moderation guidelines were published by the news site The Intercept, showing the kind of offensive rhetoric that Meta’s new policy would now allow, including statements such as “Migrants are no better than vomit” and “I bet Jorge’s the one who stole my backpack after track practice today. Immigrants are all thieves.”

Recalibrating for Trump

Zuckerberg, who has been dragged to Washington eight times to testify before congressional committees during the last two administrations, wants to be perceived as someone who can work with Trump and the Republican Party, people familiar with the matter said.

Though Meta’s content-policy updates caught many of its employees and fact-checking partners by surprise, a small group of executives were formulating the plans in the aftermath of the U.S. election results. By New Year’s Day, leadership began planning the public announcements of its policy change, the people said.

Meta typically undergoes major “recalibrations” after prominent U.S. elections, said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook policy director and CEO of tech consulting firm Anchor Change. When the country undergoes a change in power, Meta adjusts its policies to best suit its business and reputational needs based on the political landscape, Harbath said.

“In 2028, they’ll recalibrate again,” she said.

After the 2016 election and Trump’s first victory, for example, Zuckerberg toured the U.S. to meet people in states he hadn’t previously visited. He published a 6,000-word manifesto emphasizing the need for Facebook to build more community.

The social media company faced harsh criticism about fake news and Russian election interference on its platforms after the 2016 election.

Following the 2020 election, during the heart of the pandemic, Meta took a harder stand on Covid-19 content, with a policy executive saying in 2021 that the “amount of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation that violates our policies is too much by our standards.” Those efforts may have appeased the Biden administration, but it drew the ire of Republicans.

Meta is once again reacting to the moment, Harbath said.

“There wasn’t a business risk here in Silicon Valley to be more right-leaning,” Harbath said.

While Trump has offered few specific policy proposals for his second administration, Meta has plenty at stake.

The White House could create more relaxed AI regulations compared with those in the European Union, where Meta says harsh restrictions have resulted in the company not releasing some of its more advanced AI technologies. Meta, like other tech giants, also needs more massive data centers and cutting-edge computer chips to help train and run their advanced AI models.

“There’s a business benefit to having Republicans win, because they are traditionally less regulatory,” Harbath said.

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg reacts as he testifies during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 31, 2024.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

Meta isn’t alone in trying to cozy up to Trump. But the extreme measures the company is taking reflects a particular level of animus expressed by Trump over the years.

Trump has accused Meta of censorship and has expressed resentment over the company’s two-year suspension of his Facebook and Instagram accounts following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

In July 2024, Trump posted on Truth Social that he intended to “pursue Election Fraudsters at levels never seen before, and they will be sent to prison for long periods of time,” adding “ZUCKERBUCKS, be careful!” Trump reiterated that statement in his book, “Save America,” writing that Zuckerberg plotted against him during the 2020 election and that the Meta CEO would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if it happened again.

Meta spends $14 million annually on providing personal security for Zuckerberg and his family, according to the company’s 2024 proxy statement. As part of that security, the company analyzes any threats or perceived threats against its CEO, according to a person familiar with the matter. Those threats are cataloged, analyzed and dissected by Meta’s multitude of security teams.

After Trump’s comments, Meta’s security teams analyzed how Trump could weaponize the Justice Department and the country’s intelligence agencies against Zuckerberg and what it would cost the company to defend its CEO against a sitting president, said the person, who asked not to be named because of confidentiality.

Meta’s efforts to appease the incoming president bring their own risks.

After Zuckerberg announced the new speech policy Tuesday, Boland, the former executive, was among a number of users who took to Meta’s Threads service to tell their followers that they were quitting Facebook.

“Last post before deleting,” Boland wrote in his post.

Before the post could be seen by any of his Threads followers, Meta’s content moderation system had taken it down, citing cybersecurity reasons.

Boland told CNBC in an interview that he couldn’t help but chuckle at the situation.

“It’s deeply ironic,” Boland said.

— CNBC’s Salvador Rodriguez contributed to this report.

WATCH: Meta is returning to free speech tradition, says Facebook’s former chief privacy officer Chris Kelly

Technology

Apple’s market share slides in China as iPhone shipments decline, analyst Kuo says

Published

23 hours ago

January 10, 2025

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Apple's market share slides in China as iPhone shipments decline, analyst Kuo says

Jaap Arriens | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Apple is losing market share in China due to declining iPhone shipments, supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in a report on Friday. The stock slid 2.4%.

“Apple has adopted a cautious stance when discussing 2025 iPhone production plans with key suppliers,” Kuo, an analyst at TF Securities, wrote in the post. He added that despite the expected launch of the new iPhone SE 4, shipments are expected to decline 6% year over year for the first half of 2025.

Kuo expects Apple’s market share to continue to slide, as two of the coming iPhones are so thin that they likely will only support eSIM, which the Chinese market currently does not promote.

“These two models could face shipping momentum challenges unless their design is modified,” he wrote.

Kuo wrote that in December, overall smartphone shipments in China were flat from a year earlier, but iPhone shipments dropped 10% to 12%.

There is also “no evidence” that Apple Intelligence, the company’s on-device artificial intelligence offering, is driving hardware upgrades or services revenue, according to Kuo. He wrote that the feature “has not boosted iPhone replacement demand,” according to a supply chain survey he conducted, and added that in his view, the feature’s appeal “has significantly declined compared to cloud-based AI services, which have advanced rapidly in subsequent months.”

Apple’s estimated iPhone shipments total about 220 million units for 2024 and between about 220 million and 225 million for this year, Kuo wrote. That is “below the market consensus of 240 million or more,” he wrote.

Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

WATCH: Apple has to do something to justify its runup

Apple has to do something to justify its run-up, says Capital Area Planning's Ethridge

Technology

Amazon to halt some of its DEI programs: Internal memo

Published

23 hours ago

January 10, 2025

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Amazon to halt some of its DEI programs: Internal memo

Amazon said it is halting some of its diversity and inclusion initiatives, joining a growing list of major corporations that have made similar moves in the face of increasing public and legal scrutiny.

In a Dec. 16 internal note to staffers that was obtained by CNBC, Candi Castleberry, Amazon’s VP of inclusive experiences and technology, said the company was in the process of “winding down outdated programs and materials” as part of a broader review of hundreds of initiatives.

“Rather than have individual groups build programs, we are focusing on programs with proven outcomes — and we also aim to foster a more truly inclusive culture,” Castleberry wrote in the note, which was first reported by Bloomberg.

Castleberry’s memo doesn’t say which programs the company is dropping as a result of its review. The company typically releases annual data on the racial and gender makeup of its workforce, and it also operates Black, LGBTQ+, indigenous and veteran employee resource groups, among others.

In 2020, Amazon set a goal of doubling the number of Black employees in vice president and director roles. It announced the same goal in 2021 and also pledged to hire 30% more Black employees for product manager, engineer and other corporate roles.

Meta on Friday made a similar retreat from its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The social media company said it’s ending its approach of considering qualified candidates from underrepresented groups for open roles and its equity and inclusion training programs. The decision drew backlash from Meta employees, including one staffer who wrote, “If you don’t stand by your principles when things get difficult, they aren’t values. They’re hobbies.”

Other companies, including McDonald’s, Walmart and Ford, have also made changes to their DEI initiatives in recent months. Rising conservative backlash and the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in 2023 spurred many corporations to alter or discontinue their DEI programs.

Amazon, which is the nation’s second-largest private employer behind Walmart, also recently made changes to its “Our Positions” webpage, which lays out the company’s stance on a variety of policy issues. Previously, there were separate sections dedicated to “Equity for Black people,” “Diversity, equity and inclusion” and “LGBTQ+ rights,” according to records from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

The current webpage has streamlined those sections into a single paragraph. The section says that Amazon believes in creating a diverse and inclusive company and that inequitable treatment of anyone is unacceptable. The Information earlier reported the changes.

Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told CNBC in a statement: “We update this page from time to time to ensure that it reflects updates we’ve made to various programs and positions.”

Read the full memo from Amazon’s Castleberry:

Team,

As we head toward the end of the year, I want to give another update on the work we’ve been doing around representation and inclusion.

As a large, global company that operates in different countries and industries, we serve hundreds of millions of customers from a range of backgrounds and globally diverse communities. To serve them effectively, we need millions of employees and partners that reflect our customers and communities. We strive to be representative of those customers and build a culture that’s inclusive for everyone.

In the last few years we took a new approach, reviewing hundreds of programs across the company, using science to evaluate their effectiveness, impact, and ROI — identifying the ones we believed should continue. Each one of these addresses a specific disparity, and is designed to end when that disparity is eliminated. In parallel, we worked to unify employee groups together under one umbrella, and build programs that are open to all. Rather than have individual groups build programs, we are focusing on programs with proven outcomes — and we also aim to foster a more truly inclusive culture. You can read more about this on our Together at Amazon page on A to Z.

This approach — where we move away from programs that were separate from our existing processes, and instead integrating our work into existing processes so they become durable — is the evolution to “built in” and “born inclusive,” instead of “bolted on.” As part of this evolution, we’ve been winding down outdated programs and materials, and we’re aiming to complete that by the end of 2024. We also know there will always be individuals or teams who continue to do well-intentioned things that don’t align with our company-wide approach, and we might not always see those right away. But we’ll keep at it.

We’ll continue to share ongoing updates, and appreciate your hard work in driving this progress. We believe this is important work, so we’ll keep investing in programs that help us reflect those audiences, help employees grow, thrive, and connect, and we remain dedicated to delivering inclusive experiences for customers, employees, and communities around the world.

#InThisTogether,

Candi