NHS Contract:
Breakthrough In NHS & Palantir Case:
What is this deal?
Fears Are Mounting:
Palantir is not a “data broker” or “data aggregator.”
NHS Contract:
NHS England has announced plans to develop a £240million ‘Federated Data Platform’ (FDP) via a prior information notice ahead of an open procurement.
The release data for this contract is expected any time now. The publication of the contract notice was estimated to be announced on 6th June 2022.
The notice states that the data platform will be an “essential enabler to transformational improvements” across the NHS and will be an “ecosystem of technologies and services”.
The new data platform will be built around five major use cases, each wide-ranging in scope:
- Population health and person insight
- Care coordination (with focus on ICS)
- Elective recovery (with focus on trusts)
- Vaccines and immunisation
- Supply chain
Breakthrough In NHS & Palantir Case:
The top-down approach to the procurement of a £360 million data platform for NHS England is said to favour incumbent supplier Palantir as fears grow the project could be making the same mistakes that led to the failure of the country’s infamous £10 billion National Programme for IT.
The initial market engagement for the project described a three-year, £240 million ($297 million) deal to build the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP, “an ecosystem of technologies and services implemented across the NHS in England,” according to the procurement notice.
It said a formal contract notice would be published on June 6.
Suppliers met with the government body responsible for directing £136 billion ($176 billion) of health service spending in England during April and May, while the formal invitation to tender is now expected in July, with a contract set to be awarded in November, according to documents seen by The Register.
“It will fail for the same reasons,” he said.
Booth argued that NHS England was treating the exercise as merely a large software procurement without having or understanding the complete data architecture.
“There’s no data architecture that defines how this all fits together in reality. The NHS is a complex system of systems; you cannot just put in a platform and expect it to align,” he said.
“The software may do what it says but will still fail because NHS England is implementing it as a top-down system. While the ICSes may be federated, NHS England says the dashboards will be provided from its Federated Data Platform; it won’t fund bodies to buy anything else.”
“The system is supposed to support ICSes and others across the entire NHS ecosystem but there is still no published data architecture of how it will all work, only a ‘conceptual picture.”
“If this is going to be the backbone for the digital transformation of the NHS in England, it is NPfIT mark II and that ups the game. At the moment, it’s not clear even the Treasury has the full picture of what this procurement means.”
Booth argued that even the language of the procurement favours Palantir, the incumbent supplier of NHS England’s “National Data Platform” – the extension of its COVID-19 Data Store project, under a contract scheduled to close in December 2022.
The new “Federated Data Platform” will be required to manage access to data based on “purpose-based access controls,” terminology used to describe functionality built by Palantir as distinct from the “roles-based access controls” more commonly used in health IT and across industry, he said.
Other likely bidders for the project alongside Palantir include Accenture, PwC, and KPMG, possibly in partnership with software vendors Oracle and Microsoft.
NHS England has maintained it is an open and fair procurement process with more than 80 suppliers attending an early engagement event. It said the technical architecture specification, including data architecture, would be provided during the invitation to tender stage. The body said “purpose-based access control” was a term which had been used in the computing industry for 20 years and was not specific to Palantir.
What is this deal?
US data analytics group Palantir is gearing up to become the underlying operating system for the UK’s National Health Service, poaching senior NHS officials as part of a bid to win a £360mn contract to manage the data of millions of patients across England.
Palantir recently hired AI Chief From U.K.’s NHS as the company tried to expand further. Indra Joshi quit as director of AI for NHSX in March, saying it was “time to take a break before moving on to my next challenge.” She has since lined up a job with the U.S. data technology company founded by Peter Thiel.
A Palantir spokesman said the company was “delighted that Indra has agreed to join the team, which we are aiming to grow by 250 in the U.K. this year.”
“Palantir has said this is a must-win deal for them,” said a person with knowledge of Palantir’s expansion plans in the UK. “This is a five-year contract, with an option for an extension for two years. [Many people] think it’s really £1bn over 10 years. Once Palantir is in, how are you going to remove them?”
According to several figures at the NHS and at its suppliers, Palantir is viewed as the frontrunner for the FDP contract, which runs until 2027. The platform will be used for the national management of vaccines and immunisation programmes, population health, elective waiting lists and medicines and equipment supply chains, among other applications.
Fears Are Mounting:
As fears mount of Palantir’s position in the current £360 million FDP procurement, Foxglove director Cori Crider told The Register: “Palantir spent the pandemic digging into our NHS like a leech and the critter is getting worryingly fat off public funds.
“A firm that mainly supports governments to spy, wage war, and deport has no place in healthcare. Period. But this isn’t just about one – very – nasty company.
“Middle managers at the NHS now hope to make Thiel’s spy-tech firm the ‘operating system’ for the whole NHS – presiding over a massive new ‘Federated Data Platform’ that could sweep in everything from your GP record to your hospital records to social care data.
“This is centralization on a scale we’ve never seen before, and it presents stark questions about who we want seeing our health records and why. Lots of people want to feel safe to contribute their data to help the NHS – in a way they can trust and that gives them control. But who will have the keys to this vast new system, and who really benefits – is it our hardworking doctors and nurses, or will it be government bureaucrats and private firms?
“The stakes are huge. Last year over a million people opted out of the NHS Data Grab because they feared government misuse of their information and profiteering from the private sector. Twelve months later, how many patients have heard of this giant new ‘Federated Data Platform’?
Foxglove has sought details over exactly how it will work, the scope of patient information it will sweep in, and who will have access. We’ve been given almost nothing.
“This presents grave risks to trust in the health service. The government has got to get this right. And if they don’t, we’re more than happy to see them in court.”
NHS England said the NHS COVID-19 Data Store and Platform pulled in live information from across the country, helping it to anticipate the spread of the virus, protect the most vulnerable, put resources where they were needed, and manage the largest vaccination program in NHS history.
Since then, it has given NHS teams new predictive technology to help maximize their available capacity; new software to cleanse and reduce their waiting lists; new tools to help them coordinate care; and open up more slots in theaters for routine operations.
OpenDemocracy reported that, “experts have warned that contracts with the secretive company could involve an “unprecedented” transfer of patients’ sensitive health information.”
Palantir has been awarded more than £46m in public contracts by the UK government and NHS since the start of 2020.
The British OpenDemocracy group said that, “everyone should be worried about Palantir.”
“At the bank JP Morgan, an investigations team worked with Palantir to find internal malpractice. Palantir’s tools inspired the team to collect as much data as possible on staff. A staffer wielding those tools lamented that: “The world changed when it became clear everyone could be targeted using Palantir… everyone’s a suspect, so we monitored everything. It was a pretty terrible feeling.”
Furthermore, OpenDemocracy said that Palantir is too powerful:
“While we have been assured that all the data being fed into the datastore is anonymised, even supposedly anonymised data can become linked amongst wider data pools. This is part of what makes Palantir’s products powerful.”
Palantir is not a “data broker” or “data aggregator.”
“Palantir has often been described as a secretive company. There is some truth to this. For many years, we primarily served institutions with exceptional confidentiality expectations in fields like defence and intelligence. Palantir had little choice but to remain silent about our work, even when misunderstandings about the nature of the business appeared in the media or in the public sphere.”
Unlike many tech companies, the Palantir business model is not based on the monetisation of personal data. Palantir does not collect, store, or sell personal data. Palantir does not use personal data to train proprietary AI or machine learning models to share or resell to other customers. Palantir never facilitates the movement of data between clients, except where those specific clients have entered into an agreement with each other.
“Palantir builds digital infrastructure for data-driven operations and decision making. Our products serve as the connective tissue between an organisation’s data, its analytics capabilities, and operational execution. Palantir’s platforms tie these together by bringing the right data to the people who need it, allowing them to take data-driven decisions, conduct sophisticated analytics, and refine operations through feedback. We license this software to organisations, who receive secure and unique instances of our platforms in which to conduct their own work on their own data.”
This infrastructure helps organisations bring the right data together at the right time to answer complex questions and make intelligent decisions. This is particularly valuable when existing systems are fragmented, and essential information is held in silos that can’t communicate with each other.
Healthcare organisations, for instance, have used the Palantir software to tackle challenges like efficiently allocating PPE supplies when thousands of hospitals across the country have radically different and constantly changing levels of supply and demand for each item of PPE.
“With regards to customer data, Palantir acts as a data processor, not a data controller. Our software and services are used under direction from the organisations that license our products: these organisations define what can and cannot be done with their data; they control the Palantir accounts in which analysis is conducted; and any Palantir engineers that assist them in their work follow these directions.”
Palantir does not and cannot reuse or transfer our clients’ data for our own purposes.
“Attempting to profit from customer data in this way would be illegal and would undermine the trust that is necessary to work in the sensitive environments in which we have built our business, said the company”.
