Spy tech firm gets biggest NHS IT contract
NHS England has awarded a £480 million patient data management contract to a group led by a US spy technology firm.
So what? This is the biggest IT contract in the health service’s history. The brief is to build a Federated Data Platform (FDP) to fix a problem that has defeated decades of NHS digitisation projects by enabling disparate systems across the service’s network of hospitals and trusts to communicate with each other.
But the winning bid brings baggage:
- It’s supported by Accenture but led by Palantir, the data management firm founded by Peter Thiel with seed money from a CIA venture capital fund.
- It’s opposed by the British Medical Association, the Doctors Association, patients’ groups and privacy campaigners.
- It may well end up in court.
On the other hand. The Palantir bid is backed by Chris Whitty, the government’s chief medical officer and Stephen Powis, medical director for NHS England. Also: Palantir has already handled NHS data, including for official Covid dashboards throughout the pandemic.
A little history. The FDP is the latest in a series of attempts to create a more integrated data system for the NHS. It follows
- £12 billion spent on the NHS National Programme for IT, which was shut down in 2011;
- £8 million spent on care.data, which was cancelled in 2016; and
- the most recent effort, GP Data for Planning and Research (GDPR), which was abandoned in 2021 after more than a million patients opted out.
Who will opt out now? No-one, according to NHS England, which says opt-outs aren’t possible because the FDP provides direct care. Not so, says Sam Smith at the patient privacy group MedConfidential. “NHS England doesn’t do direct care,” he says. “NHS England has bought a Palantir licence for every NHS body in the country. Whether or not they choose to use it is up to them. NHS England can buy it but can’t force trusts and hospitals to use it.” MedConfidential expects further patient opt-outs thanks to Palantir’s history and reputation.
What is Palantir’s history and reputation? Named after magic telepathic balls in Lord of the Rings, the firm was created by Paypal founder and conservative activist Peter Thiel in 2004 with seed money from In-Q-Tel, a CIA-backed fund. Its early customers were the NSA, the FBI, the CIA and the US Marines. In early 2023, the German Federal Constitutional Court banned the use of Palantir’s crime data platform because of its use of surveillance data to inform predictive policing.
“Basic issues of informed consent are being ignored, and this deal could lead to a loss of privacy and seriously erode patient trust,” says Dr David Nicholl, spokesperson for the Doctors’ Association UK. “It beggars belief that this is the direction of travel, when other options could and should have been looked at. It’s a terrible deal for the NHS, for taxpayers and, crucially, for patients.”
Palantir and the NHS. The company started courting ministers and senior NHS England officials in 2019 and secured its first contract in March 2020 to create the NHS emergency Covid–19 datastore for a nominal £1.
What happens next? NHS England will embark on a public engagement project in January which will take a year; feedback is not expected until 2025.
Will this end up court? Almost inevitably. Cori Crider, director of the legal firm Foxg
ove, says there’s much that’s still unknown about the FDP, including whether it will work. “Nearly a third of hospital trials of Palantir’s kit this year seem to have failed, and we still don’t know why,” she says. “If this system isn’t useful to frontline doctors, it risks becoming a half-billion-pound flop.”
Foxglove says it will take the government to court if it fails to provide what it says are urgently needed commitments on NHS patient data privacy. Palantir will want to keep Thiel’s views of the NHS out of any litigation. Earlier this year he told the Oxford Union the service “makes people sick”. The firm said he was speaking as a private individual.
