Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin · ‘This looks absolutely rubbish’: Palantir and the NHS

I wanted to highlight this passage in particular:

By June 2018 Palantir had won its first seven-figure UK contract: a pilot project for a naval personnel management system for the Ministry of Defence. But Palantir, and Global Counsel, had a much bigger target. ‘The NHS was the holy grail,’ according to a former Global Counsel employee. At this point, the UK’s health data was held in thousands of places – doctor’s surgeries, NHS trusts, pharmacies, third-party providers – and in a variety of file formats. Creating a single digital system for NHS data had been a government objective for decades, but previous efforts had ended badly. Blair’s National Programme for Information Technology, launched in 2002, aimed to create a single electronic record for every patient. It was shut down nine years later, ‘having mostly failed to achieve its goals’, according to an independent report commissioned by the government, and hugely overrun its budget, at a total cost of £12.4 billion. In 2013 the Public Accounts Committee called the programme ‘one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector’. ‘We wasted a lot of money on big shiny American solutions that didn’t really work,’ a senior IT director in the NPfIT, Joe McDonald, who was fired after raising concerns about overspending on tech contractors, told us. A second attempt to centralise and share patient records electronically, known as care.data, collapsed in 2014 after it was revealed that the Department of Health and Social Care had sold the records of 47 million patients to an insurer.

Other initiatives have been more successful. NHS Spine, which was built using low-cost open-source tools and has been in use since 2014, enables 26,000 organisations including hospitals, GP practices and pharmacies to access patient data quickly and safely and to exchange information. But in the age of big data and AI, there remained much to be done. Joining up information and making it easily accessible to the right people could save resources and facilitate new research.

Despite having no real history of working with health data, Palantir began positioning itself as the go-to expert and Global Counsel started hiring Westminster insiders who had contacts in healthcare. Nicola Blackwood, a former Conservative health minister focused on NHS innovation, joined as a part-time adviser in 2018. She left the firm the following year when she returned to the Ministry of Health as a Tory peer, but after becoming chair of Genomics England in 2020 received payments from Global Counsel to attend events where the guests included Palantir.

During 2019 Palantir’s lobbying was persistent, but the company was careful to avoid triggering disclosure rules. That July, the evening before the launch of the NHS’s new technology arm, NHSX, Mosley hosted a meal attended by David Prior, chair of NHS England. Documents obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism show that Mosley emailed Prior the next day, thanking him for coming. Prior replied that evening: ‘Louis, Thank you for hosting such an interesting dinner and also for the water melon cocktails! If you can see ways where you could help us structure and curate our data so that it helps us deliver better care and provides a more insightful data base for medical research do be in touch.’ A couple of weeks later, the former head of MI6, John Sawers – one of dozens of former politicians and senior civil servants hired as advisers by Palantir – facilitated a meeting between Karp and John Manzoni, permanent secretary at the Cabinet Office. In subsequent correspondence with the department, Sawers hailed the benefits of Palantir’s ‘unique software’. A year later the Cabinet Office gave Palantir a £27 million contract.

Hey, is any of this sounding familiar? Get ready to have your health data fed to Peter Thiel.