Palantir secures £330 million NHS contract amid trust concerns and controversy

Palantir Technologies secures a seven-year, £330 million contract to revamp the NHS's patient-data system, following controversial ties and skepticism. The US software giant, known for assisting the CIA and Pentagon, faces challenges gaining trust amid concerns about civil liberties. Despite its success aiding the NHS during the pandemic, Palantir's secretive nature raises suspicions about handling sensitive health data. The clash between Silicon Valley's efficiency ethos and the UK's healthcare principles adds complexity, emphasising the need for Palantir and the government to prioritise public trust in this transformative project..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here..Palantir's NHS Deal Faces a Trust Deficit: Matthew Brooker.By Matthew Brooker.Palantir Technologies Inc. invested a lot of time and energy in cultivating its relationship with Britain's National Health Service — treating its chairman to $75 watermelon cocktails and working effectively for free during the pandemic. That effort paid off this week when the US software company won a seven-year contract to overhaul the NHS's patient-data system. The deal's success may hinge on how skillfully Palantir can handle another lobbying task: convincing the people who actually work in and use the health service to trust it..___STEADY_PAYWALL___.That may be a formidable challenge. Palantir's involvement in the NHS has been controversial since the start, with the British Medical Association, patient groups and civil rights activists questioning whether a company whose early backers included the US Central Intelligence Agency is an appropriate partner for a publicly funded health-care system. So there was a predictable backlash to Tuesday's announcement from the health secretary, Victoria Atkins, that a group led by Palantir was awarded a £330 million ($414 million) contract to create a so-called federated data platform for NHS England..The need to upgrade the NHS's archaic IT systems was obvious even before the arrival of Covid-19, which reinforced the urgency of the task with its imperative of collecting and coordinating vast amounts of data. Palantir, co-founded two decades ago by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel, offered its services for a nominal £1 and helped to run the country's vaccination program, described by independent think tank The King's Fund as "one of the few almost unqualified successes" of the UK's response to Covid-19. The London-based group drew a favorable contrast between the £25 million cost of licensing Palantir's software and the £155 million spent on the far less effective "test and trace" program..The NHS has multiple systems that, in the vernacular, "don't talk to each other." This is precisely what Palantir's Foundry software is designed to fix, pulling data from existing systems, cleaning it up and then presenting it on a single interface. The tool was used initially by the NHS to manage ventilators — working out where they were, what new ones were coming on stream, and which hospitals needed them most. Deploying this technology more widely offers the potential to manage resources such as operating theaters more efficiently, cutting waiting times and alleviating the pressure on an overburdened service. What's not to like?.Read more: 🔒 Elon Musk's three-year red-pilled rabbit hole: Antisemitic tweet sparks corporate exodus from social platform X.Plenty, it turns out. The objections to Palantir center not so much on the utility of its technology as on the nature of its work elsewhere and the atmosphere of secrecy and opacitythat appears to follow it around. The company got its start helping the CIA and Pentagon with counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and its products have since been adopted for mass-surveillance purposes by US agencies from the FBI to the Department of Health and Human Services. Some Palantir employees expressed disquiet after the company provided digital-profiling tools to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help apprehend and deport undocumented immigrants, the Washington Post reported in 2019. .In that light, it isn't surprising that giving Palantir access to the sensitive health data of millions of Britons has raised concern, particularly among those focused on civil liberties and privacy rights. Suspicion is natural, even if it proves ultimately unfounded. Why has Palantir shown such inordinate interest in the NHS? Information is the currency of data-mining and artificial intelligence. And if data is the new oil, the NHS is a gusher. Ernst & Young has estimated the value of the health service's 55 million patient records at $9.6 billion a year..It doesn't follow that there must be some sinister intent. The NHS is also one of the world's biggest employers, ranking fifth, with 1.5 million staff as of 2019. Successfully integrating its tools into such a huge enterprise promises to enhance Palantir's credibility as a service provider to the health-care sector, which it sees as a major growth area. For its part, Palantir says it isn't a data-mining company and its business model isn't based on monetization of personal data: It provides tools to its customers, who retain full control of their data..If doubters were looking for reassurance, they certainly haven't received it from Thiel. In a speech at the Oxford Union in January, Palantir's chairman described the UK's attachment to the NHS as "Stockholm syndrome" and advised the country to "rip the whole thing from the ground and start over." For the millions of Britons who regard the NHS as a sacrosanct institution, that's tantamount to recommending shooting Bambi. (Palantir said Thiel was speaking in a private capacity and didn't reflect the company's view)..There's a clash of cultures here, between the move-fast-and-break-things modus operandi of Silicon Valley that regards engineering excellence as paramount, and the more political environment of Britain where most people support universal health care as an ethical principle and are wary of the influence given to profit-driven private operators. Palantir and the UK government shouldn't ignore the human aspect if they want this project to work. Both may need to work on their bedside manner..Read also:.Nedbank hires Jason Quinn from Absa as new CEOLinebooker's Rademan: Red flags everywhere in SA's road freight sector as Transnet crisis bitesUNDICTATED: Firing, re-hiring of Chat GPT's Sam Altman, and why it matters – SA perspective with FNB's AI guru.© 2023 Bloomberg L.P.

Palantir secures £330 million NHS contract amid trust concerns and controversy

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