How Palantir is strengthening its hold on NHS patient data

On 20 June NHS England awarded a new £25m contract to the US data analytics company Palantir to move its existing NHS covid-19 and elective recovery data projects to a new platform.1 This will form the basis of the NHS federated data platform, a planned nationwide data system.The platform follows a series of failed attempts to create a more integrated data system for the NHS, including £12bn spent on the NHS national programme for IT, which was shut down in 2011, and £8m spent on care.data, which was cancelled in 2016.What is Palantir?Palantir—named after some magical telepathic crystal balls in the Lord of the Rings—was created in 2004 by the PayPal founder and conservative activist Peter Thiel along with Alexander Karp, Palantir’s cofounder and chief executive, using seed funding from the US Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital fund In-Q-Tel. Palantir’s early customers were the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau…
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