Palantir's Covid-era UK health contract extended without competition
- Reference: 1672832217
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/01/04/palantirs_covidera_uk_health_contract/
- Source link:
The contract has already been subject to the threat of a [1]judicial review , after which NHS England - a non-departmental government body - agreed to three concessions, including the promise of public consultation before extending the contract.
Campaigners and legal groups are set to mount legal challenges around separate, but related, NHS dealing with Palantir.
Rights groups threaten legal action over NHS data pilot based on Palantir tech [2]READ MORE
In a [3]notice published yesterday, the NHS England said the contract would be extended until September 2023 in a deal worth £11.5 million ($13.8 million).
NHS England has been conducting a £360 million ($435 million) procurement of a separate, but linked, Federated Data Platform (FDP), a deal said to be [4]a "must-win" for Palantir , a US data management company which cut its teeth working for the CIA and controversial US immigration agency ICE.
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The contract notice for FDP, which kicks off the official competition, was expected in June 2022 but was delayed until September, when NHS England told [6]The Register it would be published . The notice has yet to appear.
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In yesterday's contract notice, NHS England said it was "committed" to procuring the future provision for data management and analytics but required adequate time to do so.
"The new NHS Federated Data Platform is a large and complex project which we expect will deliver a transformed service when compared to the current service. A change of contractor at this stage would cause significant inconvenience and have substantial duplication of cost implications as in order to compliantly replace the contractor now would require two concurrent procurement processes to be run for the same service. It would therefore be both impractical and uneconomic," the award notice said.
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It said the contract could avoid a competitive tender by using the [10]G-Cloud 11 framework – an online catalogue for public-sector bodies to shop for services from cloud computing vendors who've made deals with the government. As the total of the extension is less than half the value of the £23 million ($28 million) two-year contract, [11]awarded in December 2020 , the deal did not require further competition. Although keen observers might point out it will get through the same cash in half the time.
The UK government contracted Palantir to work on health data at the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic when, in March 2020, it promised that the data processing agreement would "include the steps which need to be taken to cease processing and to either destroy or return data to NHS England and NHS Improvement once the public health emergency situation has ended."
The commitment comes from [12]a blog authored by former head of NHS Digital Matthew Gould, director of data and analytics Ming Tang, and Dr Indra Joshi, former NHS England director of AI, now employed by Palantir.
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Since Covid restrictions have been lifted in England, the work of Palantir on NHS patient data has been extended.
Under a pilot scheme dubbed Faster Data Flow, [14]NHS England is set to extract patient-identifiable data from NHS hospital systems and share this with its data platform based on technology from Palantir without consulting patients or giving them the choice of opting out.
The services are also [15]"within the scope of the requirement for the Federated Data Platform and would be transitioned to the FDP as part of its implementation in place of the existing platform" .
[16]Doctors call for greater scrutiny of bidders for platform that pools UK's health info
[17]Watchdog warns UK health data platform could damage patients' trust
[18]NHS tech chief dismisses concerns over loss of statutory power to protect patient data
[19]UK.gov finds billions in cash for big data contracts
While potential suppliers might be concerned that the extension and expansion of Palantir's work with NHS England gives it an unfair advantage in the coming FDP competition, [20]doctors have called for greater scrutiny of suppliers to ensure they have a positive track record on security, privacy and ethics.
UK government set to extract hospital data to Palantir system without patient consent [21]READ MORE
At the same time, the Faster Data Flow pilot is the [22]subject of a legal threat from campaign groups who claim it appears to [23]circumvent data protection and procurement laws.
NHS England has been contacted for comment.
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/06/legal_threat_follows_nhs_data/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/06/legal_threat_follows_nhs_data/
[3] https://www.contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/2cf9dde2-3991-4b41-8971-a9ee7ec432e2
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/13/nhs_england_palantir/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y7Wwr59Ly@JRR5Ih4au2ggAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/15/nhs_data_platform_procurement_delayed/
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y7Wwr59Ly@JRR5Ih4au2ggAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y7Wwr59Ly@JRR5Ih4au2ggAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y7Wwr59Ly@JRR5Ih4au2ggAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.crowncommercial.gov.uk/agreements/RM1557.11
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/21/nhs_awards_23m_twoyear_deal/
[12] https://healthtech.blog.gov.uk/2020/03/28/the-power-of-data-in-a-pandemic/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/databases&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y7Wwr59Ly@JRR5Ih4au2ggAAAI4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/04/uk_governement_set_to_extract/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/21/nhs_palantir_federated_data_platform/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/25/family_doctors_conference_calls_for/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/22/nhs_data_platform_ndg/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/16/nhs_tech_chief_dismissess_concerns/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/26/uk_big_data_deals/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/25/family_doctors_conference_calls_for/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/04/uk_governement_set_to_extract/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/06/legal_threat_follows_nhs_data/
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/25/family_doctors_conference_calls_for/
[24] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
>External company fails to deliver on promises, yet again, partly due to ill defined and conflicting requirements
To be fair in this case the requirement was the NHS saying to industry "1,000 people are dying every day and we have no idea how to understand the data needed to fix that pls help", so some movement of goalposts is absolutely fine. What was built works well and was done in an inhumanly short stretch of time. It contributed in a material way to helping the NHS respond to covid, particularly in the domain of planning and executing the vaccine rollout.
The problem is that all of this was done on an emergency basis. The selection was done in a back room mostly based on conversations between a couple of people from Number 10 and Palantir's execs. There was no competitive bid, no analysis of alternatives and no assessment of business case or value for money. This deployment of Foundry has now become a piece of what is effectively critical national infrastructure. It's costing the NHS something like £20m a year for what is a relatively modest data platform hosting about a dozen simple dashboarding and reporting applications. That number is about to grow to hundreds of millions per year with the FDP. It is pure and simple profiteering.
"1,000 people are dying every day and we have no idea how to understand the data needed to fix that pls help"
To be fair you don't need a system to figure out why this is happening. Poorly paid staff working long ours, long waiting lists and corruption.
Ah yes mate if we'd just doubled nurses' salaries Covid would have just gone away, genius plan, how didn't we think of that?
WEF
Palantir is a [1]WEF affiliated organisation and such access to data is crucial when it comes to development of Klaus Schwab's Great Reset.
All the baselines for social credit score have to be calculated from somewhere.
All these legal challenges will not stop it. If Klaus wants, Klaus gets. Just look how they forced Sunak to become our PM.
But don't worry, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy!
[1] https://www.weforum.org/organizations/palantir-technologies
Re: WEF
From [1]Wikipedia :
WEF chief executive officer Klaus Schwab described three core components of the Great Reset: creating conditions for a "stakeholder economy"; building in a more "resilient, equitable, and sustainable" way, utilising environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics; and "harness[ing] the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution."
Why is this so terrible?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset
Re: WEF
It's like quoting the official name of North Korea: " Democratic People's Republic of Korea" and asking why is it so terrible? It's democratic and belongs to people...
It's just an instance of doublespeak. They need to maintain the look of innocence to the average person.
Re: WEF
fuck when did qanon fuckwits start reading the reg.
slacken the tinfoil, your damaging what's left of your mind, your brain cell is dying
Re: WEF
Quite. The mods need to knock this qanon conspiracist nonsense on its head before the comments section is overrun. I dislike Palantir and their key execs as much as the next soft left bleeding heart liberal techie but this "WEF" stuff is nothing but antisemitic dogwhistle tinfoil hattery.
Re: WEF
^ WEF information warrior. They used to be triggered by word "globalist" to automatically respond with "antisemitic dogwhistle", but looks like they now trigger with just the mention of WEF.
In 2020 WEF hired over 100k so called "information warriors".
different spiel same old crap
According to the Graun Dishcloth is giving a speech outlining his priorities. "The NHS needs better data management and patients need more control of it". So he does this by giving his long termer mate Peter Thiel all our health records?
Solid advice from the vendor
"No, don't waste time improving your specifications and getting stakeholder agreement. That will just delay the project and force us to re-allocate our staff to other projects. As your Palantir project manager, my advice is to keep throwing no-bid contract money and random change orders at us until the system does what you want. That's the fastest and most effective way to shore up our balance sheet for the rest of the decade get your project up and running!"
What’s that, coming over the hill?
Is it Palantir? Is it Palantir?
This stinks in so many ways and is slimy to the touch.
External company fails to deliver on promises, yet again, partly due to ill defined and conflicting requirements, moving goalposts, and self-interest in being able to print more revenue.
The same story can be found everywhere. If your IT problem is that big, you probably want your own team / department / directorate to develop and maintain it.
Not saying you can't get contract IT in do do jobs successfully, quite the opposite. But for some problems, DIY is the only way to really get what you want (if you know what you want). Conflicting NHS trusts probably don't.