Write-back to aging NHS systems limits Palantir platform • The Register

The benefits of the UK health sector’s Palantir-powered data and analytics system are being suppressed by the limits of writing back to NHS software, MPs heard this week.

In late 2023, the US spy-tech company won a seven-year contract to provide a data platform for the NHS in England, worth £330 million ($412 million), following a procurement process that attracted criticism. NHS England, a soon-to-be-defunct quango, said the deal was necessary to improve information flow in the NHS and tackle the elective care backlog created by the Covid pandemic.

The Federated Data Platform provided by Palantir is designed to extract data from local health data systems and give local NHS planners and providers their own data environment within the platform. Speaking to Parliament’s Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, Louis Mosley, Palantir’s executive vice-president, said writing back to local NHS systems was as one of the bigger problems in implementing solutions based on the platform, and one the NHS needed to tackle locally.

“It is more challenging than reading from these systems, especially in systems that are very old and were never designed to have data extracted or written back to them. That is a challenge across the NHS, and that is one of the biggest challenges that the FDP program faces as a whole. If ultimately the end step of that process is a manual write back, where someone has to key in a decision into a system, then a lot of the efficiency is lost.”

Mosley urged the committee to ask other suppliers to the NHS to ensure that their systems support write-back as well as read from Palantir’s system. “That will just add an enormous amount of potential and efficiency to the system as a whole,” he said.

Amy Freeman, chief digital information officer at University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust, agreed that write-back from the FDP was a problem.

“If you can’t write back into source systems, that can be a productivity challenge. If the system [used by the trust] is old and doesn’t support that write back then that can be an issue, and that’s been the case where I work,” she said. “We’ve used [FDP] tools, and we’ve been able to do good stuff with the tools, but being able to write that back into the source system has been a challenge because of the age of those systems. The starting point of an organization does [determine] what value they’ll drive from the solution, but having a solution there is helpful.”

She added that neighboring trusts had been able to replace local data storage and data warehousing with the FDP and saved “some real front-line cash as a result.”

In the recent spending review, the government has promised the NHS £10 billion ($14 billion) over a four-year period to improve its use of digital technologies and support digital transformation.

Prior to awarding Palantir the deal to provide the software for the FDP, NHS England awarded Palantir £60 million ($81 million) without outside competition. It began with the US supplier offering its services under a £1 contract in the early stages of the pandemic. Palantir went on to win business worth £1 million ($1.25 million), then a £23 million ($31 million) contract was signed in December 2020, again without competition. More recent extension deals were arranged to cover the period running up to the FDP contract award.

Critics argued that because Palantir built the system which supported use cases which NHS England transferred to the FDP under these non-competitive contracts, it had an unfair advantage during the FDP competition. ®