NHS England is reportedly changing how it measures the benefits of the Palantir-built Federated Data Platform (FDP) following concerns raised by its own staff and external regulators. An NHS England official questioned the baseline used to assess performance, suggesting that seasonal patterns might be distorting the reported figures, rather than accurately reflecting the platform's impact. The Financial Times also identified errors in an underlying dataset used for these evaluations.
This comes after the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) intervened on July 22, instructing NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care to stop presenting before-and-after comparisons as if they demonstrated a direct causal link. The OSR outlined five requirements, including adding explicit caveats, commissioning an independent academic evaluation by Imperial College, clarifying that published case studies are user-written, involving the statistics team in external communications, and publishing disaggregated trust-level data.
The two key figures previously used to defend the £330 million, seven-year contract with Palantir in Parliament were 110,000 additional operations and a 15% reduction in discharge delays. However, a separate analysis by the Health Foundation found no meaningful difference in discharge delays at trusts utilizing Optica, the patient-tracking product associated with the 15% claim. The current contract for the FDP includes a break clause in February 2027.
