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The adoption of Palantir’s data platform across the health service has accelerated across England over the past six months but has fallen behind internal rollout goals set by the NHS amid pervasive doubts over its value from some health leaders.
A total of 87 acute NHS trusts and 28 integrated care boards have signed up to use the Federated Data Platform, according to information supplied to the Financial Times by NHS England.
The FDP uses software to bring together a variety of different data from separate systems — including availability of beds and medical supplies and waiting list sizes — to help improve efficiency and productivity across trusts.
The same report said the NHS was aiming for all 42 integrated care boards — wider bodies that comprise a number of trusts and health organisations in a region — to be signed up to the programme by November. Only 28 have joined, according to the data.
However, a progress report from September said they had exceeded their target of getting 71 out of 215 NHS trusts signed up by the end of the year.
NHS staff and medical trade unions have voiced concerns about Palantir’s suitability for managing data in national health systems, given it is best known for its ties to the security, defence and intelligence sectors.
Many health leaders have been circumspect about adopting the programme since the £330mn seven-year contract was awarded to the analytics group last year.
Before Labour came to power in July, then-shadow health secretary Wes Streeting criticised the “glacial” speed of take-up of the platform across trusts, saying he thought the rollout was a “good example of what happens when you are too permissive”.
In July, senior figures in NHS England wrote to trust heads telling them to confirm that they had a plan in place to adopt Palantir’s platform “in the next two years”, and submit details of their timeline for adoption the following month.
Board members at the Royal Devon and Exeter hospital noted earlier this year that there were some concerns about a lack of “local control” of data loaded on to the Federated Data Platform and that some legal questions had been raised at a national level, according to minutes from a board meeting.
Campaign group The Good Law Project has launched legal action against the government over the transparency of the contracts awarded to Palantir.
A senior figure at another London trust said they were not planning to sign up to the FDP until the “very last minute” when the deadline comes in 2026 because the benefits of the system had not been clearly established.
However, several trusts have reported finding it very valuable.
South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, one of the FDP’s pilot sites, has reported a 37 per cent reduction in the number of days patients remained in hospital after they were ready to go home since adopting the programme.
NHS England data analysis found that hospital trusts using the NHS Federated Data Platform treated on average 114 more inpatients in theatres every month after introducing the tool.
Ming Tang, chief data and analytics officer at NHS England, said the platform “boosts efficiency and speeds up care, and I’m delighted that over 100 NHS organisations have already signed up to use the service in its first year”.
Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel in 2003, is known for its ties to the defence, security and intelligence sectors and became a go-to data analytics provider for the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Palantir declined to comment.