Palantir gets £480m contract to run NHS data platform

NHS England has awarded the £480m contract for its federated data platform (FDP) to the US spy technology firm Palantir, in the face of opposition from the BMA, the Doctors’ Association UK, patients’ groups, and privacy campaigners.

Palantir, which was founded by the libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel with funding from the CIA’s venture capital fund and named after magical telepathic balls from Lord of the Rings, will sell NHS England licences for its Foundry software. This will sit across NHS trusts and let users connect disparate sets of data in one operating platform.

The FDP is designed to overcome a structural flaw in the NHS’s management of data. Over time a wide variety of data storage software has been used within and outside hospitals, general practices, and other care providers, but the software has struggled to “talk” to other programs, making it difficult to transfer patients’ records between hospitals and sometimes between departments in hospitals. Previous attempts to overcome this problem have failed to win patients’ trust. …