The UK government has six months to decide whether to terminate a deal worth more than $400 million between the country’s National Health Service and American software company Palantir. If one part of the NHS is already doing without Palantir, politicians are asking, why can’t the rest of the country?
In 2023, the UK commissioned Palantir to develop a “federated data platform” (FDP) that could ingest and organize the tangle of health data produced across the country. According to Palantir and the NHS, the new system is already cutting wait times and the length of hospital stays, and maximizing the use of operating theatres.
But lately, as Palantir technology is deployed in theatres of war and the US administration’s immigration crackdown, its deal with the NHS has become a flashpoint in the UK, drawing protests, petitions, parliamentary inquiries, and a reported rebellion among NHS workers. Other European nations, increasingly at loggerheads with the Trump administration, are also reevaluating their relationships with Palantir in a bid to minimize their dependence on US-made technology.
The health care board for one part of England, Greater Manchester, has repeatedly declined to adopt Palantir’s FDP, choosing to stick with a home-spun platform developed over the best part of a decade. The board claims it doesn’t need Palantir, that its own platform is functionally superior and more trusted by the public. “[Even] a technically strong platform will struggle to realize value if clinicians, data controllers, patients or the public do not trust it,” Matt Hennessey, chief data and analytics officer at NHS Greater Manchester, tells WIRED. “If we were to fully adopt the FDP … it would be a retrograde step.”
That claim—disputed by Palantir and other FDP advocates—has fed into a national debate over whether the government should seize an opportunity next February to terminate the NHS contract early, instead of allowing it to run until 2031.
For decades, NHS workers have used a combination of digital systems, spreadsheets, paper, and whiteboards to keep track of patients. Sometimes, when a patient moves from one care setting to another, their treatment records are left behind with occasionally deadly consequences. Without a way for different types of care providers to share information effectively, NHS administrators have had to base funding and resource allocation decisions on an incomplete patchwork of data. Palantir’s FDP is meant to change all that.
The NHS began to roll out the FDP in early 2024. The platform consists of a national pool of health data meant to help identify care deficiencies, and a bunch of local databases that individual regions can use to perform analyses and develop tools specific to their needs—say, waitlist management or discharge planning. The various components all share the same underlying technology scaffolding, in theory making it possible for tools developed in one corner of the country to be readily adopted in another.
“You can lift and shift. That’s the real power of the FDP,” says Tom Bartlett, an independent IT consultant who previously oversaw the national-level FDP rollout as deputy director of data engineering at NHS England. “The other advantage is that you’ve got a surface for artificial intelligence to work across.”
Within the sprawling NHS, two types of organizations can access the FDP: trusts that run hospitals and local care, and integrated care boards (ICBs), responsible for planning and commissioning health care services at a regional level. Both use data for different purposes, but share the ultimate goal of improving patient care.