11/13/2023 0 Comments Data guardian groupIf you don’t know Palantir, you may be familiar with the company’s chair, Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire and Trump supporter, who has funded anti-abortion candidates and invested in anti-birth-control startups. The frontrunner for the contract to run the FDP is the US tech firm Palantir, which has performed data analytics work for the US security services, border forces and police. Many would prefer that NHS England invested in its own capacity, instead of farming out to private enterprise. Putting so much data under central control may increase efficiency – but it also risks failing because of poor consultation and low patient trust. The contract to build and run the platform is worth a huge sum – £480m over five years – with the winning bidder expected to be announced any day. (Health data is managed nationally, so this system is England-only.) If data from the nation’s hospitals, GPs and social care were fed into a single system, accessible in one place to health service doctors and planners, it could potentially help planners by showing trends across regions, and the population as a whole. This partial view of the patient is commonplace in the NHS, and it is one reason the government is trying to create a vast new NHS England database, known as the federated data platform (FDP). Without this information, their assessment of your risk for surgery is, at best, an educated guess. If this data was better shared, they could create a clearer picture of your health. Of course the clinician will ask about your health before the operation but you may not remember, or even know, every detail that could affect how your surgery could go. (This kind of thing happens all the time.) A doctor is trying to judge how risky your operation is, to decide if you can go to a health centre, where you might be seen sooner and released quicker, or must be sent to a hospital.īecause your health data is held in many places – at your GP and across various hospitals where you have been – there is not one complete picture of you as a patient they can use to check. At various times you have seen your GP, and been to a hospital in south London, but the surgery is due to be carried out in a different borough. Imagine you have had knee pain for years. At the moment, caregivers in one part of the NHS often can’t access the records of care their patients received elsewhere. There is clearly a need to make patient data more consistent and accessible across the NHS. The government is seeking to overhaul the way it handles every health record in England, and its plans have filled some healthcare workers with alarm. It is particularly valuable to tech giants, who would like to get their hands on NHS datasets to build AI machine-learning systems.Īs things stand today, I believe my local GP would safeguard the record of my abortion. Ernst & Young has valued NHS patient data at £9.6bn a year. Many see in that data a source of immense potential – and profit. The NHS may hold the richest set of population-wide, machine-readable health data in the world. For decades the government has required GPs to store patients’ records in a standardised way: as well as longhand notes, every interaction with a GP is saved on a computer database in a simple, consistent code. This work has exposed me to worrying details about how our medical data can be used, including the Home Office practice of tracking migrants using their health records. In a series of cases about NHS data since the start of the pandemic, we have defended people’s right to a say about who sees their medical information. I’ve joined clinical studies in the past.īut I also help run a legal campaign group, Foxglove, that takes action against the government and tech companies when they infringe people’s rights. My Texan parents, both scientists, taught me that sharing information with organisations like the NHS can help it plan services and research ways to improve care. It’s not just that a complete health record helps my GP treat me. There’s nothing wrong, in principle, with this question, and a lot that’s right.
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