12 ms·
Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’
- nieve 4y agoUn-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/ghdS3 https://archive.ph/ghdS3
- 3746648 4y agoBloomberg used to be better. This is basically a non-story. The 'secret plan' was to use the nefarious mechanism of... Buying access that was for sale. All the allusions to shadyhandedness are just there to justify the existence of a story about Palantir because the author knew a story about a controversial company would propagate better even if it was devoid of anything meaningful to say.
- skippyboxedhero 4y agoIt is the subject: NHS, Peter Thiel, CIA, Silicon Valley, privatization...the media coverage on this sort of stuff in the UK is deranged. Palantir is just offering a "shiny dashboard", we should build your own...it is that easy, just knock up a Palantir competitor in a weekend (the NHS has decent tech units, but core NHS is like this...they hire £20k "devs", ask why they are getting hacked all the time, nothing works properly..."this tech stuff is all just rubbish"...it is like the late 90s). The author spends an article outlining an elaborate plot then slips in that Palantir didn't actually manage to acquire anyone...and was working with the NHS years before this email was sent (and provided valuable support during Covid). The irony is that this media coverage explains why healthcare tech is so bad in the UK (there is actually a listed company, worth £10m+...that is just a staff directory for hospitals, it is pre-MySpace tech, and tons of trusts use it...it is actually comic).
- anonymousDan 4y agoSo **ing what if UK healthtech isn't up to silicon valley 'standards'. As if the US healthcare system is anything to be envious of.
- drstewart 4y ago
- hef19898 4y agoThe US system isn't up to anyones stabdard except the rich and powerfull. On Palantir, all I've seen from them so far is one orbtwo levels shinier then what you can build in Excel, while costing more and providing less value.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- drstewart 4y agoCan you tell me more about this low "stabdard"? Are the doctors undertrained and poor quality? No equipment? Please elaborate. Clearly you know about high "stabdards"
- esperent 4y agoAffordability is a standard. Ease of access to all demographics, rather than just rich people, is a standard.
- drstewart 4y agoSo is healthcare IT, considering how many patients die due to medical charting errors alone. And the NHS isn't up to anyone's standard.
- hef19898 4y agoSuch a strong statement, the patients dying due to charting errors, crys for a source. As does the fact that the NHS is not among the better systems, because any statistic, spending, outcome, average life span of people, shows the various single payer systems (in order to group all state sponsored systems together even if their are differences) out perform the US one. Let's entertain so that charting errors cause patient deaths. In order to judge how the NHS performs relative to other systems would require statistics on that fact alone. Not sure those even exist.
- wuschel 4y agoI thought that Palantir is way more than a “shiny dashboard”, but that they managed to integrate data access and visualisation very well e.g. BASF is their customer for their Foundry product. Is there a detail overview somewhere what products Palantir actually has, and what technology it uses for these products?
- robertkoss 4y agoThe documentation is public. I think that Foundry is waaay more than a "shiny dashboard". Especially the concept of the ontology is ingenious in my opinion. Also the closing the loop concept is one of its kind.
- wanderlust123 4y agoCan you link the listed company? Curious to see what they actually do
- stuaxo 4y agoAnd the UK already has GDS, who in the main are very good at building digital services for government itself, they could join up more with.
- LightG 4y agoSeriously ... take your drip-drop, Palantir normalisation and shove it up your orifice. I would then be able recommend a decent NHS doctor who can look at that for you, free at the point of use, on my dime. Very best,
- anonymousDan 4y agoThis is so disingenuous. The whole point is that in a publicly funded health system many people disagree with this access being available in the first place. The UK government tries to paint a picture whereby giving such access will allow a raft of plucky UK startups to revitalize the NHS, when in reality we are just handing over our data and taxpayer money to the likes of Palantir.
- kmlx 4y agopublicly funded systems routinely use privately funded solutions. there’s nothing new or special here. that fact that people disagree means nothing and should be ignored as people disagree all the times about anything and everything.
- oliwarner 4y agoNo, that's relatively new. The NHS used to own its radiography suites. It used to own its land and buildings. It used to hire doctors and nurses and support staff directly. But because of a [also recent] forced-tender system, and high breakthrough prices on in-housing projects, it was deemed "cheaper" to let private providers burden the upfront costs of equipment, land and building management, and short contract management. Shock, horror! Letting "interface companies" extract profit makes services more expensive, and now we're paying more, it's even less affordable to talk about major public capital investment to bring these critical, primary services back in-house. The NHS needs to stand up for itself and politicians need to start talking about 20y plans. Making ends meet today isn't enough. Giving up, adding insurance companies to the mix won't do anything but make it even more expensive.
- stepbeek 4y agoYes! The UK has viewed private sector efficiency as axiomatic throughout my life. The New Statesmen has a good article on the systemic impact of such decisions in the current issue: https://magazine.newstatesman.com/2022/09/28/dieter-helm-capitalism-works-best-with-a-strong-state/content.html https://magazine.newstatesman.com/2022/09/28/dieter-helm-cap...
- LightG 4y agoHorsesh!t, greeney ... Palantir are controversial for a reason. And so I want to know everything single thing about them even tangentially touching the NHS so I know how to fight against it. But thanks for your input.
- sorokod 4y agoYou dismiss the rest of the story but accept that Palantir is controversial. Perhaps you could say something about how the fact that it is Palantir, should not be cause for concern for NHS and its patients. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Controve...
- gsatic 4y agoThere has been talk of an EU version of Palantir for a while now. Anyone know what the latest news is? Technically it doesnt look like there is anything too complex about what Foundary does.
- enviclash 4y agoIndeed the tasks described in the article were not tough nuts, which is surprising.
- sva_ 4y agoIn Germany, the latest news is that it'll cost significantly more than they initially claimed (14 mil -> 40 mil) https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/landespolitik/nrw-polizei-datenbank-software-palantir-kosten-100.html https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/landespolitik/nrw-polizei-da...
- dewey 4y agoWho would've expected that!
- _8j50 4y agoDo people know you can do wjat palantir does with Splunk?
- jonnybgood 4y agoA lot of people don’t know what Palantir does. Only what they’ve heard.
- fmsf 4y agomaybe this helps https://youtube.com/channel/UCQRc3PMlCsoodxbR4IsglKQ https://youtube.com/channel/UCQRc3PMlCsoodxbR4IsglKQ
- sangnoir 4y agoWell, I've heard Palintir is no better than any other body-shop: hype-up their tech/senior engineering acumen, get the contract and throw anyone with a pulse at the project while using boring technology (SQL, spreadsheets).
- whalesalad 4y agoThis is a pretty common practice in all sorts of industries. If you can’t compete somewhere, you buy someone who is already competing.
- collegeburner 4y agooh no, strategic m&a to enter a new market, getting a customer base and acquihiring a team with local experience? that's evil! i have lots of issues with palantir's applications spying on law abiding citizens and expanding government power but, uhh, this aint it chief.
- jonnybgood 4y agoNote that Palantir doesn’t spy on anything. It’s a shiny dashboard placed on top of an organization’s database. That’s all it is. Palantir does not provide data. It is the customer’s data.
- stuaxo 4y agoThey are ethically dubious as it the man behind it, why on earth would you give them access to a countries worth of public health data.
- mhoad 4y agoNote that you are incredibly wrong https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.12613/8070/IliadisEtAl-JournalArticle-2022-08.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.1261...
- anonymousDan 4y agoI think you're missing the forest for the trees here. The NHS is supposed to be a public service, but to undermine public support for it the UK government have been slowly trying to hack off bits of it to give to the private sector and strategically underfunding it. If they could get away with it they would probably sell the NHS down the river to US healthtech in order to get a US trade deal. So people are rightly sensitive to anything that appears to point to large private sector companies gaining an increased foothold in the NHS
- timellis-smith 4y agoDo you have any evidence for this or are you just sprouting tired old anti-government rhetoric. > Overall, there is no evidence of a significant increase in spending on private providers or widespread privatisation of services in recent years. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/articles/big-election-questions-nhs-privatised-2021 https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/articles/big-elect...
- atoav 4y agoThere are not few companies that do more damage to the societies on earth than they do good. Palantir must be easily in one of the top places of the worst offenders.
- A_D_E_P_T 4y agoTheir products are fairly mundane and seem ethically neutral in themselves, so why do you suppose this is? There are probably thousands of companies that do more damage to society than Palantir. For e.g., every company associated with an unhealthy vice, like alcohol, tobacco, opioids, and especially gambling.
- missedthecue 4y agoWhat does Palantir do? What do customers pay them for?
- fooker 4y agoDashboards. That’s it.
- hef19898 4y agoNah, also white washing data access in cases were a private company can get data and governments cannot.
- robertkoss 4y agoIt seems like you know nothing about the product at all.
- ethanbond 4y agoIn the same way that pharma companies produce “powder. That’s it.” or in the way that oil companies produce “liquid. That’s it.” or in the way that Apple produces “rectangles. That’s it.”
- mhoad 4y agoThat isn’t true and we both know it https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.12613/8070/IliadisEtAl-JournalArticle-2022-08.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.1261...
- w0mbat 4y agoOne employee suggests doing X in an email is not the same as “company has secret plan to do X”.
- finikytou 4y agodo airbus and palantir now bloomberg
- funstuff007 4y agoThere's much to not like about Palantir. I'm particularly averse to the extreme puffery regarding their tech's abilities, but buying your way into a market is far from nefarious.
- mhh__ 4y agoNHS should be aggressively acquiring data science talent. Unfortunately current gov doesn't give a shit about anything other than next week (science funding being cut to boost growth somehow)