The health service reveals that scores of hospitals are up and running on the FDP system, and claims that over 100 extra patients per trust are being treated each month
NHS England has claimed that two-thirds of the health service across the country is now using the controversial Federated Data Platform.
The system was formally launched a year ago, when big data firm Palantir was awarded a contract to provide the underlying technology. The deal will run for up to seven years, and about £500m could be spent with the supplier during that time.
The FDP provides a central national architecture to connect data sets from across the health service, while also enabling individual trusts and integrated care boards (ICBs) to create their own data platform and connect it to those established by other local NHS entities.
After 12 months in operation, 87 acute hospital trusts and 28 ICBs are now using the data system. This represents 70% of the 124 acute trusts in England, and two in three of the 42 regional care boards.
According to the NHS, hospitals that are using the FDP are operating on or administering other treatments to an additional 114 inpatients every month, on average.
The health service cited the example of the South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust was an early adopter of the FDP as part of a pilot scheme and where, according to the NHS, the average length of long-term stays has been cut by five days – equating to a 37% reduction.
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Ming Tang, chief data and analytics officer at NHS England, said: “The NHS Federated Data Platform boosts efficiency and speeds up care and I’m delighted that over 100 NHS organisations have already signed up to use the service in its first year. Its many benefits include the ability to identify those on waiting lists for longest, highlighting issues that could lead to on the day cancellations of procedures, showing when operating theatres are lying empty and speeding up discharges so patients get home faster. Hospital trusts using the tool are seeing dozens more patients each month and we’re working with NHS organisations to bring these benefits to as many more patients as possible”.
Despite all the claimed benefits of the system, the use of Palantir technology has remained a source of concern and criticism for many onlookers.
When the US firm was awarded the deal to deliver the FDP, the chair of the British Medical Association union described the choice as “deeply worrying”.
Other prominent critics at the time included Peter Frankental, UK business and human rights director, who said: “Palantir is a very troubling choice of service provider for the NHS given the human rights controversies surrounding the company.”
The firm was co-founded in 2003 by controversial billionaire Peter Thiel, who still chairs the company’s board and, appearing at an event held by Oxford Union last year, called for the NHS to be privatised and claimed the UK’s support for the institution amounts to “Stockholm syndrome”. Other representatives of the data company have distanced the company from the comments and stressed that they were made purely as a “private individual”.
One of Palantir’s early investors was the venture capital arm of the CIA. A 2020 report from Amnesty International found that the tech firm’s work supporting the US immigration and security agencies has created “a high risk that Palantir is contributing to serious human rights violations”.
FDP builds upon and supersedes the Covid Data Store that – based on Palantir’s Foundry technology – was created in the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis to serve as the health service’s core repository for data sets containing information such as infection rates, availability of beds and medicines, waiting lists, future projections and, latterly, vaccine rollouts.
