Despite growing concerns about Palantir’s involvement in the NHS, the company is looking to remain frontrunner in acquiring key NHS data from England as it is now embedded in related projects.
The FT recently reported that the NHS may split the £360m federated data platform (FDP) contract into several parts, but suggested controversial data analytics firm Palantir still remained in the voting position to be the bidder. clue.
The contract for a centralized data analytics platform, which England’s NHS has fancifully described as a future “operating system for the health service”, is primarily a data analytics platform used to analyze different data streams. The FDP is not intended to directly support patient care.
Palantir’s Foundry platform continues to be highly favored by NHS England. Trusted NHS sources have told Digital Health News that NHS officials in England are also strongly encouraging them to adopt Palantir’s Foundry data platform for other projects ahead of the national FDP takeover.
A local leader said: “I wish they would stop telling us to have Foundry just because it’s their last flavor of the month.”
Palantir is already involved in another linked NHS initiative, Faster Data Flow, an NHS pilot for uploading patient data, which is now the subject of a legal threat from campaign groups who say it appears to be ignoring acquisition and protection laws. of data.
According to the Registrythe Faster Data Flow pilot is set to “collect identifiable patient-level data related to admission, hospitalization, discharge, and outpatient activity from acute care settings on a daily basis” without consulting patients or giving them the option to opt out.
Another NHS source said: “The usual rules about patient data, consent and governance seem to stop applying when big US tech companies like Google Health or Palantir jump in and make big promises, leaders NHS seniors seem to lose their critical faculties”.
England’s NHS officials say the future FDP will bring together a variety of data sources to provide NHS managers and senior officials with the information they need to make better decisions.
The centralizing movement occurs when the 42 local Integrated Care Systems (ICS) are intended to drive local health policies and decisions.
According to NHS England, the FDP will track population health and “person perception”, care coordination, elective recovery, vaccinations and supply chains.
Palantir has been in the position of choice for FDP acquisition since it initially offered its services ‘free’ to NHS policy makers during the pandemic, providing data analytics to help plan for and respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. 19, in areas like PPE and vaccinations.
In doing so, they managed to convince England’s NHS political leaders that they needed a panopticon-like view of NHS activity. Palantir then won a £1 million contract extension followed by a two-year £23 million deal in December 2020.
They have also been influential in shaping the £360m acquisition they are now bidding to win. A contract that has already been fired from a Initial estimated value of £240 million. Some estimates suggest the deal may be worth £1 billion over ten years.
This compares to an estimated £1.8bn national investment in supplier digitization over the next four years. That is the investment in those systems that directly support patient care.
With such limited investment available for digital initiatives, critics say the FDP risks absorbing critically needed investment in the estimated 25% of NHS trusts that still lack basic electronic patient records (EPRs). ).
It also partly duplicates the data capabilities already developed by NHS Digital, the distance that NHS England is currently taking.
As it moves to try to win the lucrative FDP contract, Palantir has recruited senior digital leaders from NHSX, the former digital arm of NHS England, which includes Indra Joshi, former director of the NHS AI Lab.
It also recruited Harjeet Dhaliwal, a former deputy to Ming Tang, England’s NHS chief data officer, responsible for the FDP contract and Palantir’s previous NHS contracts. Dr. Justin Whatling, a former senior executive at Cerner, has also been hired as UK MD.
The claims made by the FDP sound dangerously close to magical thinking: a cure for all NHS ills.
An information pack provided to vendors was effusive about the current Foundry platform supplied by Palantir, stating that it is “delivering tremendous benefits and was critical to the success of the vaccination and PPE programmes.”
The implementation of this type of system in the rest of the health service “has the potential to generate benefits of 3.6 billion pounds over 10 years,” the document states.
