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Published on January 09, 2026

Beginning on Monday, January 12, 2026, at 8:30 a.m. the westbound outside lane of East 14th Street between South Cliff Avenue and South Seventh Avenue will be closed. The north sidewalk will be closed, and pedestrian traffic will be detoured to the south sidewalk.

Xcel Energy will be doing utility work.

The work is expected to be completed and traffic control removed by the end of the day on January 23, 2026.

Drivers are urged to use caution and reduced speeds while travelling near the construction area and may want to consider alternate routes.

Takeaways

• The DOL stated in a 01.05.26 opinion letter that if an employee is scheduled to use less than a full workweek of FMLA leave, the time when the employer (a school) is closed for inclement weather will not be deducted from the employee’s FMLA entitlement unless the employee was expected to work during the school closure. 
• Conversely, however, the opinion letter states if an employee is scheduled to take a full workweek of FMLA during a week when the school is closed for part of the week, the entire week is counted against an employee’s FMLA entitlement. 
• The DOL announced in June 2025 that it would launch an expanded opinion letter program.

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The Department of Labor (DOL) Wage and Hour Division issued an opinion letter on Jan. 5, 2026, analyzing how a school closure of less than one full week affects the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) entitlement of an employee on scheduled FMLA leave. The DOL analyzed key differences between calculation of FMLA leave entitlement when the leave is scheduled for less than a full workweek versus a full workweek. The opinion letter was in response to an inquiry on the calculation of an employee’s leave entitlement when a school closes for less than a full week due to inclement weather.

DOL Analysis

In its analysis, the DOL confirmed an established principle that leave entitlement may not be reduced “beyond the amount of leave actually taken” when the leave is taken on an intermittent or reduced schedule basis. Further, the DOL clarified leave taken for less than a full workweek is considered a “proportion of the employee’s actual workweek.”

Holidays, the DOL then explained, do not count against FMLA leave entitlement if the employee is scheduled for FMLA leave of less than a full workweek and is not otherwise expected to work on the holiday. On the other hand, however, the DOL stated the holiday will count against an employee’s FMLA leave entitlement if it falls during a week in which the employee was scheduled to take a full workweek of leave.

Based upon these principles, the DOL opined that if an employee is scheduled to take FMLA leave for less than a full workweek, the school is closed for at least one day during that workweek due to inclement weather, and the employee was not otherwise expected to work during the closure, the employee’s leave entitlement should not be reduced by the number of days the school was closed.

As an example, the DOL explained, if an employee was scheduled to take FMLA for physical therapy on Tuesday afternoon, but the school was closed on Tuesday due to inclement weather, the employee’s FMLA leave entitlement will not be reduced for the period of time the school was closed.

If an employee was scheduled to take FMLA for a full workweek and the school was closed for at least one day during that workweek, the DOL explained the employee’s FMLA leave entitlement would still be reduced for the entire workweek despite the school closure during the week.

Planned Closure; Makeup

Finally, whether a closure is planned or unplanned and the reasons for any closure are immaterial to this analysis, the DOL noted. Similarly, the DOL opined that whether an employer requires an employee to report on a “makeup” day on a later date does not affect the analysis.

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The DOL announced in June 2025 that it would launch an expanded opinion letter program, consistent with the agency’s renewed focus on compliance assistance.

Reach out to your Jackson Lewis attorney with any questions about complying with the laws enforced by the DOL (such as the FMLA and the Fair Labor Standards Act) or for assistance in preparing an opinion letter request.

CHICAGO — OpenAI this week introduced ChatGPT Health, “a dedicated experience in ChatGPT designed for health and wellness,” as a response to the more than 40 million people who ask ChatGPT a health care-related question every day, the company said.

Northwestern University AI-in-clinical-medicine expert Dr. David Liebovitz can speak to media about the pros and cons of the new platform, including how it is “a significant step forward from patients showing up with Google searches” but also how “patients must understand that health data shared with ChatGPT is not protected by HIPAA,” unlike in conversations with physicians or therapists. He also can speak to what true democratization of health AI looks like, and what Northwestern University research is driving to make these advances practical for patients.

Contact Kristin Samuelson at ksamuelson@northwestern.edu to schedule an interview. 

Liebovitz is the co-director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine’s Center for Medical Education in Data Science and Digital Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He has been teaching clinical informatics for several decades, incorporating new methods for education and applications of AI within clinical patient care. Liebovitz has been a chief medical information officer at two organizations where he actively implemented AI in clinical medicine.

On the opportunity:

Liebovitz: “The 21st Century Cures Act now requires health care systems to provide patients complete access to their medical records through standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) that electronic health record vendors like Epic are now required to provide. AI tools like ChatGPT Health can help patients make sense of that data. For essentially zero incremental cost, a patient can get help understanding lab results, preparing questions for appointments and identifying gaps in their care that might otherwise be missed.”

‘A significant step forward’

“More than 25 years after the Institute of Medicine report ‘To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System’ documented tens of thousands of preventable deaths from diagnostic errors and care gaps, we still haven’t solved this problem. AI assistants that can review a patient’s full history and flag potential concerns represent a significant step forward from patients showing up with Google searches. These tools synthesize information in context rather than generating alarm from isolated symptoms.”

On concerns:

“Patients should understand that health data shared with ChatGPT is not protected by HIPAA. Unlike conversations with physicians or therapists, there’s no legal privilege. This data could potentially be subpoenaed in litigation or accessed through other legal processes. For sensitive health matters, particularly reproductive or mental health concerns, that’s a real consideration.”

On the bigger picture:

“The question isn’t whether patients will use AI for health information, 40 million people already ask ChatGPT health questions daily. The question is whether we can help them do so more effectively and safely, with appropriate guardrails and realistic expectations about what these tools can and cannot do.”

On local/on-device models:

“There’s an alternative approach that sidesteps the privacy concerns entirely: running AI models locally on a patient’s own device. Modern smartphones now have sufficient processing power to run capable language models without any data ever leaving the phone. No cloud storage, no corporate servers, no subpoena risk.”

On the technical trajectory:

“On-device AI capabilities, which run AI directly on local hardware such as phones and wearables instead of sending data to the cloud, are advancing rapidly. Apple’s own approach with Apple Intelligence validates that sophisticated AI can run locally. Open-source models optimized for mobile hardware are improving month over month. Within a year or two, a patient could have a highly capable health assistant running entirely on their phone, analyzing their downloaded medical records with complete privacy.”

On the democratization angle:

“Here is what true democratization of health AI looks like: A patient downloads their records using the APIs health care systems are now required to provide, runs them through an AI model on their own phone and gets personalized insights without their data ever touching a third-party server. No subscription fees, no privacy tradeoffs, no dependence on any company’s policies or terms of service.”

On what Northwestern is exploring:

“Our research group is actively exploring how to make this practical for the public. The technical pieces are falling into place: access to standardized health records, powerful mobile hardware and increasingly capable open-source models. The goal is giving everyone access to meaningful second opinions on their health data while keeping that data entirely under their control.”