NHS tech chief dismisses concerns over loss of statutory power to protect patient data An outgoing NHS tech chief has defended the decision to merge his organization with a UK government-run unit, arguably diluting the statuary protection of patient data. Simon Bolton, interim chief executive of the soon-to-be-defunct NHS Digital, said the merger of the organization with NHS England, a non-departmental …
Bingo. Though the outcome won't even require secondary legislation. Under the current setup NHSD is an independent organisation with its own executive, its own board and its own staff. Under the new setup it simply becomes a department of NHSE and can be directed to do things. This poses a significant moral hazard because NHS England & Improvement, to give them their full title, have a strong remit to push for service improvement, including collaboration with the private sector and are crucially under ministerial direction. NHSD as data stewards will now be subordinate to that.
This has already happened in practice. Simon Bolton is an "interim" chief exec for NHSD. Prior to that he was the genius brains acting as CIO for the unprecedented success that was NHS Test and Trace. He was brought in specifically to disarm NHSD and ensure it came through the merger toothless and subordinated to NHSE. His job being marked interim allowed his near-direct appointment without advertisement or competitive recruitment process.
(Prior to that he was an executive at the unremarkable and failing companies JLR and Rolls-Royce. Hardly a titan of industry.)
The same goes for a whole host of key exec positions at NHSD and NHSE. Job titles left, right and centre are carrying that magic (interim) title. It's political appointment by the back door.
And the NHS delivery of services is being run by "panels" who review the GP's request for patient treatment, who make unilatteral decisions that the patient's do not really need the medical service which the GP has requested.
With this sort of information sharing already going on at pace, between the NHS and the NHS Trusts, what have we the patients got to worry about ?
ALF
Sending my data to Palantir is a deal breaker for me when it comes to using NHS England services.
But hey, that's what the Tories are after isn't it. If they can persuade people like me to avoid using the NHS that would cut waiting times and costs with the added benefit of probably reducing my lifetime and removing a non-Tory voter from the register sooner than otherwise.
> If they can persuade people like me to avoid using the NHS...
That means either doing without or paying for private medical care either directly (if you can afford it) or via insurance, either way its a win to the Tories as they will point at this and say people want private health care...
The trouble is we are reaping the benefits of 40+ years of Tory under investment... As Northamptonshire County Council (Tory controlled since 2005) found out, the inevitable outcome of traditional Tory policies is insolvency...
'Merging'?
I was under the impression this was bringing the operations of "NHS Digital" (a private company) back under the "NHS" umbrella and thus subject to "NHS" patient data protection law.
Sending the data to Plantir is problematic in two ways, there is the actual data and that the UK government who want to "kickstart" the UK economy is giving business away to foreign companies, and so once again hobble the development of UK knowledge industries...
This post has been deleted by its author
as useful as having laws that protect vulnerable people from ASB Officers or any of the hundreds of other paid for "authority" creeps who are abusing vulnerable service users, on a daily basis, by totally ignoring the remit of their posts or the procedural guide lines of their employers.
Jimmy Savile got away with his sexual predatory antics for years whilst his professional mates covered his tracks for him.
Well it seems to be the same MO (modus operandi) for all of our precious UK support services for British "subjects",- actually we only want your money, we don't give a shit about the rules of engagement, 'cos no one with any credibility is supervising .............and you cannot afford to appeal........
ALF
Citizen? Aren't we supposed to be peons who do what they're told (and, soon, won't even be able to strike to be heard)? And bend over and take it when a crazy woman elected by a miniscule subset of the population comes in, fucks the economy and people's mortgages (although certain people made huge gains by shorting the currency), then buggers off with a potential ~£100K pension for life. Not bad for a couple of weeks of causing utter chaos.
Us? Well, didn't Rishi and that other guy say taxes will have to go up and there will be eye watering decisions to make? They fuck up... or more literally hand huge amounts of money to themselves and favoured friends and... we will be expected to pay for it.
Of course absolutely everything depends on the definitions of "appropriate" and "properly". The fundamental question that nobody is likely to answer in public is what specific protections are to be implemented against what specific threats to the rights and freedoms of data subjects. Those protections are the essence of the GDPR that the UK is attempting to sidestep by revising the legislation in favour of "growth and innovation" (i.e. big business).
When I now see my GP I have to respond to every question with "is that medically relevant to the issue I came in with?" That is not good for our relationship, trust between GP and patient, my treatment, or my willingness to support the NHS. Sub optional outcomes and more strain on the NHS are inevitable.
I’d like to just be able to just e-mail my GP Surgery (private profit-centred NHS Contractor Business).
“I have some updated immunisation results from a vaccine update and screening (Occupational Health for an NHS Trust). Can I e-mail them to you to add to my GP Patient Record’ No, you need to print them off and hand them in/post them. …. FFS.
(I'm the person who commented in another article that I knew about the Palantir thing a while ago.)
The alphabet soup is a real problem: loads and loads of money spent, lots of consultants and strategy people; few things usefully happening.
This all (currently) requires individual trusts to give data to Palantir. At least one is doing this right now. Just as they did when they gave Google a load of data for nothing.
Most of this is cluelessness from the NHS. They can't make some dashboards of data and relate them to patient pathways, so they spend an absolute fortune on Palantir, which makes it a bit easier to make nice dashboards off their data. Anything advanced they do isn't necessary; the average NHS trust is completely hopeless at even the basics.
NHS England may be able to aggregate data centrally, or perhaps use financial penalties to make trusts comply, but neither seems that likely at the moment.
>perhaps use financial penalties to make trusts comply
The business case for the billion-pound Federated Data Platform (the £360m procurement is only procurement 1 of... several) makes it explicit that NHSE has no power or plans to force the trusts to adopt Pala^H^H the as-yet-undecided-future-state-platform. Any future adoption by the trusts will be at their cost. Any future business benefit from the new definitely-not-Palantir platform will require trust adoption. NHSE have no ability to yield value from the new FDP themselves. NHSE as of yet have no trusts on board with this plan.
Meanwhile the trusts and CSUs are off building their own TRE/SDE platforms in parallel because they're not fucking daft and aren't going pay Palantir rates.
Essentially we're gonna pay Palantir half a billion quid to do a smash-and-grab on the trusts' data and then sit there doing nothing with it.
Not really. The consultancy groups involved in this are almost universally opposed to Palantir's involvement. Palantir have an MO where they'll buddy up to an SI or partner to gain access to a new account and then once the business is won lock that now-former-partner out of the future work and have it all done by their *legions* of field engineers, who will design, build and (uniquely) operate the platform. Nobody's had the gumption to try that since the bad old IBM days.
In this case the fuckwit powerpoint artists at Faculty AI are the ones who have been screwed. They leveraged their ~unique~ connections to senior figures in the Johnson government during covid to land themselves and Palantir at the centre of covid response. Palantir have now built this into a nine-figure revenue stream. Faculty meanwhile are begging for scraps.
Your Accentures, your Deloittes, your Capgeminis and whathaveyers who are around the place at DHSC and NHSE might be unscrupulous, but they're not fucking stupid. They know fine well their only chance for a sustainable stream of future work is with someone like Microsoft or Databricks at the core of the future-state architecture. Letting Palantir run the show will yield another failure of a scale not seen since NPfIT.
This is entirely, absolutely about what looks like revolving-door corruption with former senior departmental staff taking jobs at Palantir, and about common-or-garden-variety corruption with Palantir taking relevant senior ministers out for dinner and a round of golf or three.
(OP here again.)
Of course - they'll want to push either no technology, because then they can bill strategy and analysis time forever, or a different locked-in approach. As you say, it might be Microsoft, or something else. But they're all pushing their own lock-in. Palantir's tools are better than Microsoft's, for what they do, so I don't understand your point about avoiding Microsoft being the path to failure. They're *all* the path to failure, from the NHS's perspective, and the consultancies are only unhappy when the path to failure doesn't allow them to bill for it.
Not really true and hasn't been for quite a while. The vast majority of GP records exist electronically and are transferred between surgeries electronically under a system called GP2GP. This digital integration of GP records is a system managed by NHSD and is exactly where NHSE/Palantir are going to hoover up your records from. There are certain scenarios where the system falls back to paper but they're increasingly rare. For example going from primary to secondary care, GPs have been uploading summary care records for use by hospitals since about 2015 and e-referrals have been a requirement since 2018.
Likewise most hospital trusts should be operating with digital systems first. For example hospitals should have an electronic prescriptions/medicines administration system as the sole source of truth for medicines. This EPMA data is uploaded into an NHSD-managed data platform for centralised planning. This is exactly where NHSE/Palantir are going to hoover up your records from.
There's a pattern here.
You don’t have a ‘single NHS England’ you have 250+ overlapping trusts with their own boards, CEO’s, finance teams, people and training teams all layering their own ‘localised practices’ bullshit on top of what NHS (England) Core systems (like ESR Payroll and Training) and supply-chain they deem to use, half use, ignore or on many cases duplicate.
It’s run like the Co-op.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
