So if i'm reading this correctly, the GM ICB has been working on it's own analytics platform for 6 years, it's developed in-house, locally hosted, functional, and fits their needs? And they have been in contact with the team coordinating the bid process? and the NHS still went ahead and awarded a contract worth hundreds of millions to a foreign business for the same or adjacent software? and this software is handling some extremely sensitive data?

I'm not surprised, just disappointed.

yes, it was always a tory conjob selling our data to right wing loons like thiel.

labour should have cancelled it and asked for all data to be destroyed and all money returned from the scum bags

All tories need to be fucking jailed for all the fucking fraud they did over the last 15years

The charitable interpretation would be that while Greater Manchester ICB has its analytics already sorted out, other ICBs in the country are not as advanced and might be in a position to use the Palantir offering.

A more reasonable interpretation is that here is something which already exists, could and should be rolled out to other trusts and dump Palantire.

Exactly that. Some icbs are doing well while others are far behind, but I think we should use more of what GM has rather than buy Palantir.

It could have been done along the lines of the GP data analytics offering from https://www.opensafely.org/ which is "publicly funded, built by researchers and software developers at the University of Oxford, all IP is shared openly, and the Data Controller is NHS England."

But I do think it's best to stick with one of the big four consultancies plus a software as a service supplier well known to be a serial data abuser run by an extreme right wing nut job. Time and again it's been shown how this delivery model provides quality solutions on time, on budget and with unrivalled levels of end user satisfaction.

No, it could not have been done using OpenSAFELY. For starters, NHS England had no legal access to the data except for COVID until recently.

In addition, much of the source data resides on vendor systems and until recently has been inaccessible.

Furthermore, it isn't clear whether that system could have scaled nationally to the level required. Bearing in mind that the forerunner to FDP was stood up in a hurry (at ministerial command, not NHSE's desire) during COVID.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that FDP is a good architecture and certainly not that I would personally EVER want to do business with Palantir, but that doesn't mean that there are necessarily obvious alternatives.

Same in Leeds. There is an integrated IT/patient record system that allows Leeds Teaching Hospitals, GPs, the mental health care trust, community healthcare trust and to a limited extent social services, to view each others records. . Seamless, frictionless while incorporating robust safeguards on access and a verifiable audit trail so that nobody will be snooping on records they should not be accessing.

Developed in-house at little cost by people who know and work in the local healthcare settings, rather than paying a fortune to external agencies who don't work in healthcare and have no understanding of what our requirements are. The likes of Palantir invariably come up with a clunky bodged solution that is unusable and hideously overpriced.

"locally hosted", locally designed.

Would it scale nationally? Was any work done to try? Would it meet the requirements of other ICB's?

Not saying you are wrong. But I will say that it is rarely that straight forwards.

to see why the NHS went with Peter Thief (sorry: Thiel).

The UK should use Manchester's system and then sell it to other countries - that this would annoy Trump‡ is just an added bonus.

‡ Less money to one of his mates and less USA intelligence about the health of UK citizens.

The "NHS" did not go to him. Nor did anyone that I'm aware of who actually worked for the NHS ever WANT Palantir involved. They went straight to the minister and "wow'd" him. He then commanded the NHS to implement it.

When it then came round to FDP, there was already so much lock-in than no other vendor could realistically win the business.

Won’t someone think about the Palantir share price, and the grubby politicians that own shares?

When I was in ICL, the call-logging-ticketting system (SIAM) ran on the old mainframes. It was old, clunky, had some restrictions, but worked.

It was due for an upgrade, but the suits made a deal for some off-the-shelf-but-never-heard-of replacement that simply didn't do what was required. Actual users of the old service obviously hadn't been contacted about requirements.

After much moaning, and bespoke code changes that didn't help, along with general reliability issues, it was eventually dumped for another off-the-shelf system (and the ICL guy responsible for the contract left to join the board of the company that created the software.)

The replacement, whilst better, was still missing stuff and had to be tweaked for some time (ICL was big enough that they could demand tweaks)

________________________

This one is even worse, and more relevant to the article.

I worked on the team that provided ASPECT - a monitoring system for the Unix servers (and some forms of VME monitoring), and collated messages that could be directed to pagers/call systems/mobile phones etc.

Pretty standard stuff these days, but this stuff had been around for years - long before I joined the team.. Many people from council IT workers to NTL/Virgin/ICL/DOD staff would have been aware of ASPECT.

Near the end of the 90's, corporate announced this "brilliant deal" with CA to rollout their monitoring tools company-wide. Whoever had made that deal had not researched what was currently being used, and didn't realize there was a whole team that wrote customized software to do the very same thing.

It was crud. The Unix modules were pants. They did provide a windows module, which was something we had needed to add, but damn was the overall thing expensive, and not suitable for our requirements (even other teams we had no direct relationship with told us it didn't fit their needs like ASPECT did).

Partly because of this, and partly because ICL had this bloody system in place already, I was tasked with writing stuff that would allow ASPECT backbends to interface with these clients.

Not long into this project, my suspicions were confirmed. I had to go to some internal conference thingie off site, and got talking to one bigwig about the frustrations with all the extra work we had. No surprise, he hadn't heard about ASPECT, and had been told that the CA deal would bring all these cool features we didn't already have. I explained that all the companies UK paging and alerts went through ASPECT, and mentioned some of the other things it did (some of which he was familiar with [like automated paging], but didn't know how it had all worked.)

He said he'd explore ASPECT to make sure it was used to its full potential, and would raise the fact he hadn't been told about it with the people associated with the deal.

His main feelings at the end of the conversation were something like "We have something, written internally, owned by us, that does the same thing, but is not generic, and works well with our specific use case, is run on a comparative shoestring budget... Why didn't I know of this before this deal happened?"

Well exactly.

I left the company a year or so later (2001ish) not long before ICL was swallowed whole into Fujitsu.

P.S. I also admit some of the ASPECT code was cruddy. During an audit I found some software written by someone I'd never met (who had long since left the company) even had this sprinkled through his C source:

system ("sleep 5");

And we know now where that ended up ...

Here's a thought. The Health Sec is taking direct control over from NHS England. How about he undertakes a survey of his new empire to see what he's actually got that works, is created in house, is totally under UK control, not US and doesn't involve forking out huge sums of money for anything other than the H/W to run it on.

Well, he clearly doesn't even know what NHS England's statutory functions are so the chances of him doing something so sensible seem rather remote.

And he absolutely is not taking over direct control, he is dumping it (notionally) on the Department for Health and Social Care.

There is only one reason this is actually all happening. Labour need to show QUICKLY that they are shutting off the gap in UK finances. The NHS is a major factor both in overall cost and in constant overruns (though those are largely due to having had funding constantly cut). If they don't do this quickly, they won't have leeway before the next election to give some generous handouts to the electorate and they will loose to Reform who will sell out the whole country to right-wing private sector, exactly as it happening in the USA (who's politicians are backed by the same right-wing extremist billionaires).