IT Essentials: Scandal-in-waiting

Open season on the NHS

The government launched (and controversially awarded) a host of technical contracts for the NHS this week. But the future of the health service's IT remains in doubt.

Another year, another plan to revamp the NHS's IT. There have been several attempts to move to a shared records system since the £12.7 billion failure of the National Programme for IT in 2011, and all have hit snags, delays and pushback.

Part of the problem is people's understandable concern about allowing a private company (the NHS, for all its good points, doesn't have the resources to develop a system itself) to access and store their medical records, which proved a sticking point against the seemingly abandoned GPDPR.

So, of course, the obvious thing to do this week was...hand a contract to a private US-based company with a questionable record, which has previously announced its plan to "buy its way in" to the NHS, without oversight or an open tender.

The process itself may not be legally corrupt, but it is another thumb added to the scales already tipping in Palantir's favour for future NHS contracts - which tend to favour the incumbent.

That's especially concerning when it comes to the £480 million Federated Data Platform (FDP), the spiritual successor to NPfIT.

Palantir may or may not be directly involved with the FDP, but even if not there are plenty of supporting contracts to pick up - like this one, launched this week, to keep patient data safe and worth a cool £35 million.

Still, we can at least console ourselves with the knowledge that, even if the FDP goes the same way as its predecessor, it (probably) can't hope to achieve the same scale of failure. They just don't make public IT scandals like they used to.