Palantir has already won half-billion pound NHS contract, report claims

Controversial big data analytics firm Palantir has been awarded the £0.5 billion contract to create an NHS patient data platform, pending ministerial approval, according to health news website Digital Health.

Editor-in-chief Jon Hoeksma wrote yesterday that he "understands" the contract for the Federated Data Platform has been awarded to Palantir, but quoted no sources.

Digital Health reported that Ming Tang, chief data and analytics officer for NHS England, told health IT experts at an event last week that the procurement was complete but sign-off for the contract award was with ministers.

However, an NHS spokesperson has said: "Despite continued speculation to the contrary, NHS England is still in a procurement process and will make an announcement in due course."

As a firm that specialises in analysing sensitive data for the defence, government, health and financial services sectors, Palantir has drawn controversy over decisions to entrust it with NHS patient data while it also works for US defence and security agencies.

David Davis, a Conservative MP who has long campaigned to protect people's personal data from prying government and security agencies, told Parliament on Tuesday that giving Palantir NHS patient data could thwart efforts to develop a patient data system, by undermining people's trust.

Designed to improve patient care through analysing patient and other health data, allowing doctors to derive insights to cure disease and help people, the £480 million Federated Data Platform was due to be kicked off with a contract award in September, though this has since been delayed.

Palantir already supplies data services to the NHS, which stakeholders are concerned means it will be unduly favoured over the competition for the FDP.

In June Palantir was awarded a £25 million contract to administer a hand-over, over the course of the next year, from its data systems to the systems of whoever finally won the FDP contract.

It would "support the safe transition and exit from the incumbent supplier to the new FDP-AS supplier when it is awarded and established," NHS England said in the contract award notice in July.

It is not unprecedented for NHS England to delay making a public announcement about a contract award until months after the deal is done. In January, it announced an £11 million contract it had awarded Palantir for patient data services six months earlier. Work had already started in December, said the notice on the government's Contracts Finder service, designed to increase transparency and public accountability over public procurement and spending.

That contract was an earlier extension of an existing Palantir contract to provide data platform services, intended to keep the NHS running while NHS England finalised details on the "large and complex" £480 million FDP project procurement, it said.

It was, meanwhile, "impractical and uneconomic" to launch another public competition to replace the existing Palantir system, while it was already striving to complete the procurement to replace that system with FDP, it said.