More than two dozen NHS hospital trusts listed by NHS England as benefiting from Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP) have said they are not using the system, or are using only limited parts of it, according to responses obtained through freedom of information requests.
NHS England says 137 trusts are live on the platform and identifies 29 as “realising benefits”. However, several of those trusts told investigators that the FDP was not operational, had not been implemented or was not being used for patient-care applications. The discrepancy was described as “very misleading” by a senior health official.
Among the responses, Epsom and St Helier said it was not using the FDP, while Kent and Medway said the platform was not currently live because the trust had prioritised other work. Mersey Care said it had not yet gone live, and Nottingham University Hospitals said no implementation timetable had been agreed. University Hospitals of North Midlands said the FDP was not live and that it did not intend to introduce it in the future.
The findings come as Health Secretary Yvette Cooper faces pressure from MPs and campaigners to end Palantir’s contract for the government’s flagship health data system. The £330m platform is intended to connect medical records, support hospital discharges and improve the scheduling of surgery.
Palantir’s UK and Europe chief executive, Louis Mosley, has defended the contract, saying that cancelling it would put politics before patients. The company has also rejected criticism of its work and its links to military and government clients.
NHS England has previously claimed that trusts using the FDP carried out 117,539 additional operations in one year. It later acknowledged that it could not establish a cause-and-effect relationship, prompting scrutiny from the Office for Statistics Regulation, which said it would examine the matter through its casework function.
Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons science and technology committee, said the responses raised questions about whether claims surrounding Palantir’s products reflected their real-world use. She called for the government to use a 2027 break clause in the contract and hold an open competition for a UK-based supplier. The Commons health select committee has also called for the deal to be withdrawn.
The information was collected by Medact, a medical charity campaigning against Palantir’s involvement in the NHS. Its spokesperson, Dr Rhiannon Mihranian Osborne, accused public bodies of using questionable accounting to support a controversial project and asked whether ministers could be relying on misleading claims.
NHS England said that almost 140 trusts had reported benefits from the platform’s tools, including improvements to care and efficiency. It has clarified that its list includes trusts using the system for back-office analysis and data submissions, rather than directly supporting patient care.
Some trusts classified as live may therefore have the platform’s infrastructure in place without actively using its applications. Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, for example, said it was not using the FDP operationally, while NHS England records it as live because its infrastructure supports data submission.
Marc Farr, chair of the NHS Chief Data and Analytics Officers Network, said reported benefits needed to be accurate, transparent and verifiable. Palantir said trusts using its software had recorded 117,000 additional operations, a 14.3% reduction in discharge delays for long-stay patients and a 5.6% improvement in the number of people receiving a cancer diagnosis or all-clear within 28 days.
Sources: The Guardian Business.