NHS England planning to develop a £240million ‘Federated Data Platform’

NHS England has announced plans to develop a £240million ‘Federated Data Platform’ (FDP) via a prior information notice ahead of an open procurement. 

The notice states that the data platform will be an “essential enabler to transformational improvements” across the NHS and will be an “ecosystem of technologies and services”.

The new data platform will be built around five major use cases, each wide-ranging in scope:

1. Population health and person insight
2. Care coordination (with focus on ICS)
3. Elective recovery (with focus on trusts)
4. Vaccines and immunisation
5. Supply chain

There is a suggestion that the procurement will consist of two lots – one to be for the platform itself, with the capacity for ICS integration and the relevant consultancy and communications support, and the other for privacy-enhancing technology. The market notice also says that other procurements that are relevant to the project could be made by other organisations.

NHS England says it intends to hold a supplier briefing session in relation to the project on 13 April 2022 and estimates the publication of the contract notice to be on 6 June 2022.

Digital Health News understands that the front-runner for the FDP is widely assumed to be the existing data platform provider, Palantir, which has been working extremely closely with NHS England on provision of a national NHS data platform throughout the pandemic, as part of a contract thought to be worth £23m.

This led to campaigning legal firm Foxglove issuing a lawsuit on behalf of openDemocracy over the £23m NHS data deal with Palantir. The lawsuit claimed that NHS England failed to consider the data protection impact of the deal on patients and the public.