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Hospitals in England have been told to pass patient data to Palantir, the US data mining firm thought to be in poll position to win a 480 million data management contract to create a Federated Data Platform (FDP).

That's according to news and campaigning site openDemocracy, which cites a letter from NHS England's deputy chief executive and chief financial officer Julian Kelly to NHS trusts.

In the letter seen by openDemocracy, Kelly tells the trusts to begin uploading patient information to a new centralised database called "Faster Data Flows" by the end of March. Faster Data Flows, which has been trialled since last summer, is based on Palantir's data integration and analytics platform Foundry.

The move is controversial for several reasons, the first being that the FDP contract has not yet been awarded. Other bidders include a consortium of UK companies that says it can fulfil the five-year contract for significantly less than the 480 million the government has budgeted. Having the data already effectively formatted for Palantir would give the US firm a significant advantage.

A second cause for concern is the impact on privacy and confidentiality. While NHS England has stated that all patient records have been psuedonimised and Palantir says it does not process identifiable data, it is widely accepted that identifying an individual from a medical record and a few other data sources is trivial. For this reason, pseudonimised data still counts as personal data under the GDPR and patients should have to opt in to sharing their data.

A third issue is the nature of Palantir, and the way it is seeking to extend its tentacles into the NHS.

The secretive Peter Thiel-founded and CIA-funded company, which has a background in government and corporate surveillance, was originally handed a 1 contract during the Covid pandemic to assist with vaccination and ventilator distribution, but Foundry has since found its way into multiple other parts of NHS England's operations. Last year, a leaked paper revealed Palantir's strategy of "buying its way" into the NHS via acquisitions if contract bids are blocked.

Once Palantir is embedded in the NHS, it would be very hard to displace.

"Every trust in England will be forced to integrate Foundry into their workflows," GP IT consultant and clinical informatics expert Marcus Baw told openDemocracy. "This means there has already been significant taxpayer investment in using Foundry.

He continued: "Trusts are busy, with limited IT team capacity, so they cannot afford to redo work. To me this means that the system will already have significant momentum towards Palantir and Foundry."

Tory MP David Davis tweeted: "Sharing this NHS data with Palantir raises serious concerns about the security of masses of sensitive personal data. Pseudonymisation does not allay these concerns. The Government must seek explicit approval from Parliament before proceeding."

Several campaigning groups are threatening legal action against NHS England over the 480 million FDP contract. The groups, which include legal firm Foxglove, the Doctors' Association, the National Pensioners Convention and campaign group Just Treatment, are demanding the government reveal what data will be shared.

Foxglove tweeted that the deal "looks like GPDataGrab on steroids", a reference to a previous attempt by NHS England to share patient data with big tech the General Practice Data for Planning and Research (GPDPR), which was abandoned after a public revolt.

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NHS England tells trusts to upload patient data to Palantir by end of ... - Computing