How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Pushed Toward the Heart of U.K. Health Care

Peter Thiel at a conference in Florida last year. At an event in England this year, he called public support for the N.H.S. “Stockholm syndrome.” | Chandan Khann/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
THE NEW YORK TIMES: Palantir, the analytics company led by Peter Thiel, has courted N.H.S. England with pandemic help and assertive lobbying. Its big reward may be yet to come.

It began with a £1 contract.

In the hours after a pandemic was declared in March 2020, Palantir, the secretive American data analytics company, was invited to 10 Downing Street along with other tech groups, including Amazon, Google and Meta, to discuss how it could help the British government respond.

Within days, Palantir’s software was processing streams of data from across England’s National Health Service, with Palantir engineers embedded to help. The company’s services, used by the C.I.A. and Western militaries for more than a decade, were deployed to track emergency room capacity and direct supplies of scarce equipment.

Palantir charged the government just one pound.

The deal provided the company with a valuable toehold. Since then, Palantir, which is chaired by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and one of President Donald J. Trump’s major 2016 donors, has parlayed the work into more than £60 million in government health contracts. Its biggest reward may be yet to come: a seven-year contract worth up to £480 million — about $590 million — to overhaul N.H.S. England’s outdated patient data system.

But an outcry over Palantir’s rapid ascent within the N.H.S., the beleaguered but beloved public institution that provides free health care across the country, has been building for months among some lawmakers, doctors and privacy campaigners. It could come to a head in October, when the winning bid is expected to be announced. » | Euan Ward and Adam Satariano | Euan Ward and Adam Satariano, reporting from London, spoke to health service officials, Palantir employees and industry insiders, as well as reviewing email correspondence and notes from internal meetings. | Friday, September 29, 2023

It would appear that the privatisation of our beloved National Health Service is to be kicked up a few notches. – © Mark Alexander

Palantir: Trump-backer’s Data Firm That Wants Access to Your NHS Records

THE GUARDIAN: Company co-founded by Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel has been criticised for US defence and immigration contracts

Peter Thiel’s Palantir is favourite to win a £360m contract to amalgamate a wide range of NHS health data on to a single platform. Photograph: John Lamparski/Getty Images
For a company tipped to provide the NHS’s new overarching data platform, it is appropriate that Palantir Technologies is named after an all-seeing orb.

Palantir, which draws its name from the powerful crystal balls deployed in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, is the favourite to win a £360m contract for the NHS’s Federated Data Platform (FDP). Covering everything from individual patients’ data to vaccination programmes, waiting lists and medical trials, the FDP will aggregate data from multiple sources and different formats on to a single platform.

According to a document sent to potential bidders for the five-year contract, it will “provide access to real-time data to enable decision-making to better coordinate care”. Speaking at London Tech Week last week, the health secretary, Sajid Javid, said: “This is the perfect moment to bring data together and reap the benefits.”

The ambitious scope of the platform has alarmed campaign groups, who fear for patient confidentiality, privacy and data security, but the identity of the frontrunner has also caused concern.

US-based Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel, one of Silicon Valley’s few high-profile Donald Trump supporters. The $15.6bn (£12.7bn) company has been criticised for its work with the US immigration agency, as well as its intelligence service and defence contracts. It already works closely with NHS England by providing software that processes data for a variety of purposes including take-up of Covid-19 vaccines and managing the post-pandemic bounce back in elective care (surgery or treatment booked in advance). » | Dan Milmo, Global technology editor | Tuesday, January 21, 2022

Palantir, the all-seeing US tech company, could soon have the data of millions of NHS patients. My response? Yikes!: You might never have heard of tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s CIA-backed analytics company. But it could know all about you if it wins a contract to manage NHS data »

This is troubling news indeed! I don’t want any company owned by this Trump-supporting ideologue to have any access to my NHS data. Thank you, but no thank you! In any case, he has got crackpot ideas on ageing. You can check out some of his ideas on YouTube. Here’s a link to one interview. It doesn’t look to me as though he is “winning the fight”!

That BoJo is considering giving this man and his company access to all this sensitive data in the NHS shows the need to kick BoJo out of office with dispatch.

This is another Brexit bonus, I guess. One can see it on the horizon in the sunny uplands yonder. – © Mark Alexander