US-headquartered data analytics company Palantir has secured the contract to provide the technology for an NHS new data platform, despite privacy concerns and the tech company’s close association with the Republican Party.
The NHS said it hopes that its Federated Data Platform will join up key information currently held in separate NHS systems, making it easier for staff to access key information that it hopes will ultimately improve patient care.
Following a protracted tender process, the world’s largest healthcare organisation has awarded the software contract to a group led by Palantir Technologies UK, with support from Accenture, PwC, NECS, and Carnall Farrar.
Palantir was initially contracted to work with the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic on a nominal fee of £1.
Much of the firm’s previous business had come from outside healthcare, providing software to the US military, security, intelligence, and police agencies.
Palantir then went on to win a non-competitive £23.5m contract in December 2020 to provide real-time information on disease prevalence and vaccinations during the outbreak, using its data integration software, Foundry.
NHS England said the contract with Palantir would last seven years and cost £330 million ($412 million). It expects to invest £25.6 million ($32 million) in the platform in the first year.
Campaigners have raised concerns about data privacy and patient confidentiality and the potential for patients’ data being mishandled.
There have also been concerns around the firm’s origins and political ties: co-founder Peter Thiel (who also cofounded PayPal and was an early investor in OpenAI) is a Republican Party member. The data software firm’s original funding was provided by the CIA.
While a range of UK health and care organisations have shared public statements of support for the principles behind the Federated Data Platform, with the abundance of enterprise software firms offering data integration tools out there, the NHS is now in a position where it has to defend its choice with civil libertarian groups.
Independent international media platform Open Democracy claims that Palantir’s software aided the US immigration enforcement agency to carry out a controversial, hardline deportation policy introduced under the Trump administration in 2017.
Even National Data Guardian and NHS psychiatrist Nicola Byrne suggested Palantir should be excluded from the platform in a blog post published on the gov.uk site in August.
Perhaps anticipating objections to its controversial award, in its statement the NHS said that ‘no company involved in the Federated Data Platform can access health and care data without the explicit permission of the NHS.’
‘All data within the platform is under the control of the NHS and will only be used for direct care and planning. It will not be used to access data for research purposes and GP data will not feed into the national version of the software platform.’
In the same NHS statement, Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp pointed out that the FDP will also be the first use case in the NHS of Privacy Enhancing Technology – a nationally assured and funded privacy tool.
Karp pointed out that “the procurement for NHS-PET has been run separately from the Federated Data Platform and the suppliers are deliberately different.”
US multinational IQVIA was announced as the winning bidder for this particular contract, in a three-year deal with options to extend.
However, even this Fortune 500 firm isn’t without controversy. IQVIA was contracted by the UK government’s Office of National Statistics to provide data on the prevalence of Covid during the pandemic.
Issues with how the survey results were collected were criticised for potentially leading to biased data in a report by New Scientist.
