The implementation of the controversial tech system for connecting trusts to a wide range of data will deliver almost £4 of pure upside for every pound spent, a review suggests
The NHS’s Federated Data Platform will deliver returns of five times the costs of implementing the system, newly published project documents indicate.
The programme to deliver the Federated Data Platform (FDP) formally began work in 2022 and the rollout of the system throughout the NHS commenced two years later – following the award of a potential £500m deal to us tech vendor Palantir, whose technology underpins the platform.
According to a newly published project assessment, the programme’s “full business case estimates that the FDP will realise benefit in the order of £780m over the seven-year appraisal period”.
The review clarifies that includes direct financial return of £60m per year by the end of this decade, plus £55m in annual non-cashable benefits, plus £38m in wider “societal benefits”.
The whole-life costs of the programme – including those incurred outside of the public sector – are estimated at £1.04bn, according to the most recent annual government major projects portfolio (GMPP) report.
But, once the annualised benefits are in full effect, the FDP project will deliver “a benefit-cost ratio of 4.92”, the recent assessment says. This means that, for every pound spent, almost £5 will be returned – including £3.92 of pure financial upside.
Returns could be even higher still as, following in publishing the review, “the programme has since entered its delivery phase and anticipated benefits exceed the values set out at the point of the accounting officer assessment being carried out”.
Value-for-money is one of the four areas covered by the accounting officer assessment, the regular completion of which is a requirement for all programmes in the GMPP. The document – which is undersigned by the project’s accounting officer, Department of Health and Social Care official Shona Dunn – also signs off delivery of the FDP against the three other necessary metrics: regularity; propriety; and feasibility.
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In the latter area, the assessment says: “In the full business case, the programme has outlined the ways of working, which describe the operating model requirements of the platform and set out the high-level responsibilities of the successful supplier. This includes proposed approaches to delivery, product management and contract management. The programme team is finalising the implementation plan with the successful suppliers. The contract incorporates strict mechanisms and controls for managing performance through a series of service level agreements and key performance indicators. The required contract management and governance structures are agreed.”
The assessment is dated 29 May 2024, but the final portion of the document explains that “the delay in publication of this summary is a result of the timing, which coincided with the pre-election period for the last general election; further delays were experienced due to structural changes at a senior level”.
FDP is designed to provide a central national architecture to connect data sets from across the health service. It also enables individual trusts and integrated care boards to create their own data platform and connect it to those established by other local NHS entities. About 170 of these organisations have signed up to do so thus far, and more than two thirds of these are already up and running on the platform.
The platform builds upon and supersedes the Covid Data Store that – using 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.
When the US firm was retained to deliver the longer-term FDP project, the chair of the British Medical Association union described the choice as “deeply worrying”.
Other prominent critics at the time included senior representatives of Amnesty International, who said that “Palantir is a very troubling choice of service provider for the NHS given the human rights controversies surrounding the company.”
A 2020 report from the human rights organisation 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”.
Palantir was also 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 firm from these comments and stressed that they were made purely as a “private individual”.
