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NHS Funding £330 Million to Palantir over 5 years - Patient Data To Be Controlled By Palantir The Tory government's privatisation of the NHS has reached a pivotal point, as the creation of a huge Database of every NHS Patient's medical data will be built by a US military company, Palantir, with the American company having complete control of the data it stores with no right of patients to 'opt-out' of their medical records being stored by the Company. Such a database is a fundamental requirement of private healthcare insurance schemes such as Medicare in the USA. Despite major problems with previous schemes to share NHS Patient's private medical data via a national database and the ability of patient's to opt out of their private data being stored nationally and then shared with the authorities, the police, local authority, and private healthcare companies; the Tory Government is hell-bent on sharing your medical data with whoever is happy to pay for it! This new data system of patient's medical data, is called the Federated Data Platform (FDP), and will facilitate the storing of medical data in one central point, and allow the sharing of patient's data across all hospital's and Integrated Care Systems and Integrated Care Boards, and other bodies as determined by the Secretary of State and/or changes in legislation. The contract given to Palantir, Accenture and two other companies; immediately prompted concerns about the security and privacy of patient medical records and the suitability of Palantir to be given access to and oversight of such sensitive material. Palantir is primarily involved in developing and providing AI-powered military and surveillance technology - but can it be trusted with NHS Patients private medical data, is the question! Palantir has also supplied technology to governments that allows them to spy on their citizens. Palantir is known for working closely with intelligence agencies and military organisations around the world, such as the CIA, NSA and UK;s GCHQ and Ministry of Defence, and Israel's intelligence services. It developed spy-ware allowing military and government access to any citizen's social media accounts, website data; and even email accounts. Its technology helped enable US border control agencies to identify, exchange information about and track migrants and asylum seekers, and also to plan raids that led to parents being arrested, separated from their children and deported. The news organisation, Open Democracy, reported on this at the time. Furthermore, Peter Thiel, its billionaire founder and current CEO, backed Donald Trump in his 2016 presidential election.
Worse than that, he believes the NHS should be scrapped and healthcare provided by the private sector as in the USA, claiming that the NHS makes British citizens ill, and turns them into 'Stockholm Syndrome' victims and that it should be privatised. Palantir having been given the 5 year contract has been overshadowed by Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs, as well as tech, medical and civil liberties groups, voicing unease about Palantir, the potential for patients’ data being mishandled and also whether patients will be able to opt out of the FDP sharing their data. Currently NHS England has said that there is 'no opt-out' from the Federated Data Platform (FDP), because it would anonimise all data before it was shared and also because the data would be used for “direct patient care”, for which no opt-out is available. The Guardian newspaper on 21st November, reported that Amnesty International had said Palantir’s involvement in “serious human rights abuses” meant NHS England should have rejected the bid. “Palantir is a very troubling choice of service provider for the NHS, given the human rights controversies surrounding the company”, said Peter Frankental, Amnesty’s business and human rights director. “Any NHS public procurement tenderers whose activities have been linked to serious human rights abuses, as is the case with Palantir, should be excluded on grounds of ‘grave professional misconduct’, as permitted under procurement law.” The public needed “assurance that their personal information won’t be harvested by Palantir for purposes that have little to do with their health”, Frankental added. In the same Guardian article: The British Medical Association, which had previously voiced concern about the NHS’s alleged lack of scrutiny of bidders on “ethical” grounds, said Palantir’s winning bid was “deeply worrying”. The news article also said that NHS England stressed that none of the companies in the winning consortium would be able to access health and care data without its explicit consent; that it would retain control of all data within the platform; and that it would not include GP data.
That of course assumes the public and more importantly,NHS patients actually trust NHS England, knowing that the Secretary of State can simply change the way the data is used and to whom it can be given! Trust was an issue in the two previous attempts by NHS England to bring its huge stores of data together – opposition has forced it to abandon two similar projects since 2012. It will be hard to convince the public of the FDP’s potential benefits this time around. Meanwhile, the Government have promised in this news release, a public engagement exercise starting in the new year and continuing until March 2025. It will gather public views on digital and data transformation in the NHS. But major radio and TV news outlets have simply ignored it, as with majority of issues ongoing in the NHS and the Government's continued privatisation of NHS services. Source: The Guardian / NHS England / Gov.UK / openDemocracy / BMA See also: Private Healthcare Companies Who Pay The Piper, Play The NHS Privatisation Tune? So You Don't Believe NHS England Is Pushing Patients Into Paid Private Treatment? NHS Privatisation News Archive
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