UK Consortium unsuccessful in its bid for £480m Federated Data Platform

The UK consortium bidding to run the £480 million Federated Data Platform (FDP) for the NHS has been unsuccessful, Shane Tickell, the chief executive and founder of one of the consortium members, Voror Health Technologies, confirmed to Digital Health via Twitter.

The failure of the consortium’s bid means that US data analytics giant Palantir remains the leading candidate to win the contract.

Last month, Voror said it had joined forces with database company Eclipse and software provider Black Pear to challenge Palantir and others for the contract to manage the proposed FDP, a data analytics platform which the NHS has said is meant to track population health, care coordination, elective recovery, vaccines, and supply chains.

NHS England officials have said the future FDP will bring together a range of data sources to provide NHS managers and senior civil servants with the insight to make better decisions. They have described the FDP contract as a future “operating system for the health service”.

Privacy and legal advocacy groups have said Palantir’s work with intelligence and security services in the U.S. make it a questionable choice for managing NHS England’s trove of personal health data.

They have also criticised the lack of transparency in the tendering process for the FDP contract, saying that Palantir had a clear advantage due to its work during the Covid-19 pandemic helping the government manage Covid data.

In a debate at Digital Health’s Rewired 2023 conference last month, GP and IT consultant Marcus Baw  argued that NHS England has provided little clarity on how the system would be designed to work, or why such a centralised systems is even needed.