May 11 (Reuters) – Britain’s state-run National Health Service (NHS) is granting staff from companies including Palantir “unlimited access” to identifiable patient data while \u200cworking on its flagship National Data Integration Tenant (NDIT) platform, the Financial \u200cTimes reported on Monday.<\/p>\n
NHS England has agreed to create an “admin” role granting non-staff “unlimited access” to the \u200bNDIT and identifiable patient data, the FT report said, citing an internal briefing note.<\/p>\n
The NDIT is housed under the Federated Data Platform, which links disparate NHS datasets into a single system.<\/p>\n
An NHS spokesperson said Britain’s health service has “strict \u200cpolicies” governing access to patient \u2060data and conducts regular audits to ensure compliance.<\/p>\n
Any external access requires government security clearance and approval from a director-level \u2060official, the spokesperson added.<\/p>\n
Palantir is legally designated as a “data processor”, while its customers are “data controllers”, meaning its software can process data only in line with customer instructions, \u200ba \u200bspokesperson for the firm said.<\/p>\n
Any other use \u200bwould be illegal and “technically impossible” \u200cdue to access controls overseen by the NHS, the spokesperson added.<\/p>\n
Palantir won a 330 million pound ($448 million) contract to develop the NDIT in 2023. It has also secured contracts with Britain’s Defence Ministry and Financial Conduct Authority, deals that have drawn scrutiny due to its work with U.S. government defence agencies.<\/p>\n
“There \u200cis currently considerable public interest and concern \u200babout how much access to patient data \u200bPalantir\/Palantir staff have,” the briefing \u200bnote viewed by the FT said.<\/p>\n
The note recommends a time-limited \u200cand regularly reviewed cap on the \u200bnumber of external admins \u200bwith access to the NDIT, it added.<\/p>\n
Officials confirmed to the FT that the recommendation in the briefing note had been accepted in \u200brecent weeks but said \u200cit would apply to only a small number of non-NHS staff.<\/p>\n
($1 = \u200b0.7359 pounds)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Ananya Palyekar in Bengaluru and Anna Peverieri in \u200bBarcelona; Editing by Janane Venkatraman\/Keith Weir)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"May 11 (Reuters) – Britain’s state-run National Health Service (NHS) is granting staff from companies including Palantir “unlimited…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33954,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[15742,13,15743,15744,5416,8124,15741,15740],"class_list":{"0":"post-33953","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-briefing-note","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-national-health-service","11":"tag-ndit","12":"tag-nhs-england","13":"tag-palantir","14":"tag-patient-data","15":"tag-unlimited-access"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116557086817211328","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}