What could possibly go wrong…
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The implication that patient data is being "sent to Palantir" is misleading; the data remains in UK systems, but NHS England (not the wider UK-wide NHS) has granted Palantir contractors "unlimited" admin access to view raw, identifiable patient records directly. This creates a dangerous loophole where external US staff can bypass standard, granular privacy checks simply because obtaining individual permissions was deemed "too inconvenient."
This is a fundamentally poor decision. Granting sweeping administrative privileges to a foreign intelligence-linked firm is a lazy shortcut that prioritises engineering ease over patient safety. By dismantling strict access controls to save time, NHS England has unnecessarily exposed millions of patients to risk, undermining the very principle of knowing exactly who accesses sensitive health data.
Right, and Palantir will immediately copy that data. So effectively there's no difference.
This headline sounds like the start of a decent Bond film.
The article glaringly lacks saying why
The NHS has a wealth of data which makes conducting studies across large population groups possible. For example Dexamethasone as a treatment for COVID was identified thanks to having access to a medical history and outcome data across the NHS.
Even so there has not historically been a unified data storage solution as information is split between GPs and individual hospital trusts. Previous attempts to have a single system failed due to complexity and cost overruns. The current solution is the federated data platform (FDP): https://www.england.nhs.uk/digitaltechnology/nhs-federated-data-platform/ which attempts to interoperate with multiple primary data sources to help clinicians access patient records as well as help with resource and service planning.
I assume the Palentir system is involved with providing some sort of AI insights into that data store.
Obviously bad but wasn't this a breaking news story from several days ago? What's new?
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