Greater Manchester says its NHS analytics stack is years ahead of Palantir wares

Care board draws red lines over use of UK government-backed Federated Data Platform

A report for a Northern England health authority says its analytics platform is more capable than anything offered under a controversial central government deal with Palantir.

The Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board (ICB) set out red lines for its adoption of the government's Federated Data Platform (FDP), which the US spy-tech biz is building under a £330 million ($442 million) seven-year contract awarded in November 2023. The award followed a series of non-competitive deals with the vendor totaling £60 million ($70 million) that established several use cases present in the FDP.

The report to the Greater Manchester ICB, which manages health services for 2.8 million people, said:

"The NHS [Greater Manchester] Data, Insight and Intelligence Team have been in close contact with the national FDP team since its inception. Our assessment is that our local capability exceeds anything the FDP currently offers and that some of the capabilities we currently have actively in use within [Greater Manchester] are around 2-3 years away from being fully operational with the FDP environment although a detailed development roadmap for FDP with associated timescales for delivery has not been clearly articulated."

NHS England, a government quango set to be dismantled, plans to use the FDP to "make it easier for staff at NHS trusts and integrated care systems to access the information they need, freeing up valuable time to reinvest in delivering the best care possible for patients."

The NHS is under pressure to reduce huge waiting lists for elective care that built up during the pandemic.

In April last year, NHS England awarded global consultancy KPMG an £8.5 million ($11.4 million) contract to help implement the FDP at a local level and provide "technical support and implementation services."

Last week, The Register reported that the chief executive and chief digital information officer of Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust – which oversees seven hospitals and treats around 1.5 million patients a year – warned that its analytics team would "lose functionality rather than gain it by adopting" FDP products.

There are 215 trusts in the NHS in England, including acute (hospital), mental health, specialist or community trusts. NHS England said more than 120 NHS trusts had signed up to use the FDP, including 84 percent of hospital trusts, and "72 are already live as part of a phased rollout to provide better care and services for patients."

However, the Greater Manchester ICB paper noted that "formally onboarding to FDP does not actually require a trust or ICB to actively use the facility but it is a necessary first step to enable use. A significant number of those who have already onboarded are not using or do not currently have plans to use FDP."

The paper also noted that "FDP is not a like-for-like alternative to" Greater Manchester's Analytics and Data Science Platform (ADSP), which "has a greater range of purposes, capabilities, and uses than FDP."

"[The] FDP may be able to offer functionality in the mid-term that supersedes some individual components of the ADSP and we should retain the ability to assimilate FDP into our infrastructure to benefit from the things it comes to exceed in," the paper said.

As well as the capability of the FDP, Greater Manchester ICB noted concerns about working with Palantir, which has attracted controversy by providing digital profiling tools for the CIA and US immigration agency ICE. Recently, CEO Alex Karp told investors that the company was founded to "power the West to its obvious innate superiority."

"The Greater Manchester branch of the Unite Union have also contacted us outlining concerns and objecting to the implementation of a Palantir-run FDP," the board paper said.

The report, written by chief intelligence and analytics officer Matt Hennessey, said the ADSP had been six years in the making and is "based on a hard-won foundation of trust that we have built with the public and health and care professionals on the use of their health data."

It said there had been several communications from NHS England about the FDP, including the introduction of an "FDP first policy" that effectively mandated a conversation about the system. "In July 2024, all trusts and ICBs were asked to declare when they would onboard and what components they would adopt. On the 10th December 2024, NHSE wrote to NHS GM encouraging rapid adoption of the ICB instance."

The paper recommends "red lines" in its FDP adoption. The ICB should not "put our locally held GP data from the ADSP into FDP" and incur additional cost. FDP adoption should not create "any adverse impact on our ability to provide a local secure data environment for research and innovation" and any public communications about FDP must not "directly or indirectly erode local public trust," it said.

"Recent communications on the progress of the programme and the numbers onboarding may imply a much deeper level of engagement, activity, and data transfer than is actually happening and we need to be careful that this does not undermine trust."

NHS England has confirmed that there is no requirement to add GP data to FDP and there will be no direct costs to Greater Manchester.

Last week, an NHS England spokesperson told The Register: "The FDP is already delivering for the NHS – helping to join up patient care, increase hospital productivity, and ensure thousands of additional patients can be treated each month." ®