Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board (ICB) has decided not to adopt a national data platform – prescribed by the UK government and run by Palantir – until it has more evidence of the benefits and risks.
The regional health leadership team heard that its existing data platform, which it had built over six years, exceeds the capabilities of the national Federated Data Platform (FDP), created by the US spy-tech firm under a much-criticized £330 million ($445 million) seven-year contract awarded in November 2023. Soon-to-be-defunct quango NHS England signed the Palantir contract after a series of non-competitive deals with the vendor totaling £60 million ($81 million) that established several use cases present in the FDP.
At a meeting yesterday, the Greater Manchester ICB, which manages health services for 2.8 million people, deferred a decision to sign up to the FDP. It is the only ICB in England yet to do so.
Speaking at the committee meeting this week, Sheena McDonnell, chair of people and culture, said NHS England still hadn’t addressed the board’s concerns around risks. “We need to participate in the National Program that might benefit the population in terms of that shared data, but it feels like [we] don’t really understand what those risks are yet. If we haven’t got a response from the chief data officer of NHS England yet, then what’s the rush for us to [sign up] right now?”
Greater Manchester ICB helps oversee £6 billion ($8 billion) in public NHS funds. It has spent six years building its own analytics system on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform with technology from data pipeline vendor Matillion, analytics and data lake company Snowflake, data visualization firm Tableau, University of Manchester’s eLab, and others.
A report to the board by chief intelligence and analytics officer Matt Hennessey said that this local capability “exceeds anything the FDP currently offers and that some of the capabilities we currently have actively in use within [Greater Manchester] are around two to three years away from being fully operational with the FDP environment although a detailed development roadmap for FDP with associated timescales for delivery has not been clearly articulated.”
Mark Fisher, Greater Manchester ICB chief executive, said that signing up to the FDP would not cost the ICB anything, but would “make it easier to have those conversations from the national team about prospective future functionality and its benefit.”
“That’s all recognizing we already have – due to six years in progress together by the analytical digital community and many others around Manchester – a fantastic platform for doing a lot of this anyway. Indeed, a lot of the business cases for FDP came from data which we had produced on our system. In fact, the population health [work]; that business case is all based on our data and our insight in the first place,” he said.
There are 215 trusts in the NHS in England, including acute (hospital), mental health, specialist, and community trusts. NHS England said more than 120 NHS trusts had signed up to use the FDP, including 84 percent of hospital trusts, and “72 are already live as part of a phased rollout to provide better care and services for patients.”
A report on the system for the Greater Manchester ICB said that “formally onboarding to FDP does not actually require a trust or ICB to actively use the facility, but it is a necessary first step to enable use. A significant number of those who have already onboarded are not using or do not currently have plans to use FDP.”
NHS England told The Register earlier this month: “The FDP is already delivering for the NHS – helping to join up patient care, increase hospital productivity, and ensure thousands of additional patients can be treated each month.” ®