For an organization tipped to offer the NHS’s new overarching knowledge platform, it's acceptable that Palantir Applied sciences is known as after an all-seeing orb.
Palantir, which attracts its identify from the highly effective crystal balls deployed in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, is the favorite to win a £360m contract for the NHS’s Federated Information Platform (FDP). Masking every thing from particular person sufferers’ knowledge to vaccination programmes, ready lists and medical trials, the FDP will combination knowledge from a number of sources and totally different codecs on to a single platform.
In keeping with a doc despatched to potential bidders for the five-year contract, it'll “present entry to real-time knowledge to allow decision-making to higher coordinate care”. Talking at London Tech Week final week, the well being secretary, Sajid Javid, stated: “That is the right second to carry knowledge collectively and reap the advantages.”
The formidable scope of the platform has alarmed marketing campaign teams, who concern for affected person confidentiality, privateness and knowledge safety, however the identification of the frontrunner has additionally brought on concern.
US-based Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel, one in all Silicon Valley’s few high-profile Donald Trump supporters. The $15.6bn (£12.7bn) firm has been criticised for its work with the US immigration company, in addition to its intelligence service and defence contracts. It already works carefully with NHS England by offering software program that processes knowledge for quite a lot of functions together with take-up of Covid-19 vaccines and managing the post-pandemic bounce again in elective care (surgical procedure or therapy booked prematurely).
However the prospect of it establishing an overarching knowledge platform for NHS England has alarmed Foxglove, a UK authorized marketing campaign group that focuses on accountability within the expertise trade. Foxglove’s considerations, and people of comparable organisations, centre on two points: the security of affected person knowledge, and the character of the corporate that can arrange the information framework and search to use it.
“A agency like that has no place being the ‘working system for the NHS’ – interval,” says Cori Crider, a director at Foxglove, who provides that the corporate “makes no secret of its want to maintain taking advantage of battle and surveillance”.
Crider provides that there's not sufficient public details about the FDP, though paperwork have been circulated amongst would-be bidders. In keeping with the paperwork, the principle five-year contract for FDP is price £360m and the platform will ship £3.6bn in advantages over 10 years.
“We’ve obtained deeper considerations about this Federated Information Platform,” says Crider. “How a lot confidential affected person knowledge goes to be swept in, who's going to have entry, and on what phrases? It’s clearly not being constructed simply in your GP – it'll serve a number of different authorities officers. We’ve despatched a authorized letter in search of solutions, and obtained nearly no element in return.”
Phil Sales space, founding father of medConfidential, which campaigns for confidentiality in healthcare, says Palantir is the favorite for the contract as a result of it already carries out among the work envisioned within the FDP.
“Palantir is already doing lots of the issues that are going to be finished by the platform. To maneuver away from one thing that's already deeply embedded into NHS England’s programs can be a big shift.”
He provides that it's “loopy” to amalgamate such all kinds of NHS features right into a single monolithic system. “NHS England proposes swapping out the entire advanced knowledge flows throughout an entire host of life-critical programs simply by shopping for one firm’s product off the shelf. This single platform, the concept of 1 factor to rule all of them, is odd. You can't simply slap in all the information and count on all the ecosystem’s architectures to align and combine.”
Palantir was co-founded in 2003 by Thiel, 54, a co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Fb. Some preliminary funding got here from In-Q-Tel, the enterprise capital arm of the Central Intelligence Company – the US overseas intelligence service – reflecting the corporate’s origins as a instrument to fight terrorism. Palantir’s software program packages course of enormous quantities of knowledge, enabling purchasers to determine beforehand undetectable patterns and connections or, as the corporate places it, convert “large quantities of knowledge into information that displays their world”.
It's deeply embedded within the US public sector. Different US authorities purchasers embrace the tax-collecting Inside Income Service, the US monetary watchdog and the Division for Well being and Human Companies. It additionally has a contract with the US military to modernise its battlefield intelligence system and is reportedly working with the Pentagon on Mission Maven, its synthetic intelligence programme.
It helps a number of western governments fight terrorism and governments account for greater than half of its income, with purchasers together with the UK Ministry of Defence. Regardless of surging revenues – up 41% to $1.5bn final 12 months – it has posted annual internet losses of $520m, $1.2bn and $580m since 2019.
Its most controversial contracts lately have been with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Company (ICE). It really works with an ICE subdivision referred to as Homeland Safety Investigations (HSI). HSI tackles drug smuggling, cash laundering and human trafficking, amongst different types of legal exercise which may break US immigration and customs legal guidelines.
Palantir says it has by no means had a contract with the ICE unit liable for deportations, Enforcement and Removing Operations or ERO. However a US immigrant rights group, Mijente, says its expertise performed a task in raids on food-processing vegetation in Mississippi in 2019 by which 680 undocumented immigrants – described as “detachable aliens” within the official press launch – had been arrested.
Thiel, 54, is a libertarian billionaire who has used his fortune to help rightwing candidates within the US, together with Trump’s profitable bid for the presidency in 2016. His different Republican endorsements embrace Hillbilly Elegy creator JD Vance, who's operating for the Senate in Ohio, and Blake Masters, a senatorial midterm candidate for Arizona who warns of “widespread wokeness” on his web site. Talking at a bitcoin convention in April, Thiel described ESG – which stands for environmental, social and company governance and is a cornerstone of accountable investing ideas – as a “advantage signalling, hate manufacturing unit time period” whereas describing cryptocurrency’s supporters as a “revolutionary youth motion”.
Palantir’s co-founder and chief govt, Alex Karp, 54 is a Joe Biden supporter who instructed the New York Instances in 2020 that his leftwing upbringing and twin heritage – of a Jewish father and African American mom – would make him a pure goal within the wake of a far-right powergrab. “Who’s the primary individual who's going to get hung? You make an inventory, and I'll present you who they get first. It’s me. There’s not a field I don’t verify.”
Nonetheless, Palantir’s itemizing on the New York Inventory Alternate in 2020 was accompanied by a letter from Karp that slammed the Silicon Valley group. Across the identical time Palantir introduced it was shifting its headquarters from California to Denver, Colorado.
“Our firm was based in Silicon Valley. However we appear to share fewer and fewer of the expertise sector’s values and commitments,” Karp wrote. “Our software program is used to focus on terrorists and to maintain troopers secure … We've chosen sides, and we all know that our companions worth our dedication.”
The pinnacle of Palantir’s London workplace is Louis Mosley, grandson of Oswald Mosley and nephew of the late former president of Components One’s governing physique, Max Mosley, who turned a privateness campaigner later in life. Talking to the Sunday Instances in 2020, Louis Mosley stated Palantir’s origins had been as a defender of private privateness. “Palantir was truly began to protect towards authorities overreach into private privateness. A lot of the software program we’ve constructed is to show these sorts of protections.”
Palantir describes itself as a software program firm that doesn't mine or promote buyer knowledge. Certainly, the bidder paperwork for the FDP state it's a platform that might be “owned and managed by the NHS”.
An NHS spokesperson stated: “Protected and safe use of affected person knowledge permits the NHS to construct providers which might be extra conscious of sufferers, and this software program we're in search of to make use of for the FDP will put the NHS accountable for its knowledge and make sure that delicate affected person info is stored in a safe setting that meets the best nationwide requirements.” The spokesperson added that the NHS would run a “honest and open” procurement course of for the platform.
However MedConfidential’s Sales space says Palantir’s work outdoors the UK ought to give the NHS pause when it considers awarding the contract, resulting from begin in November. “Is that this actually an organization we need to have on the coronary heart of our NHS? You can't divorce a bit of software program from the corporate that makes it.”
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