More than 20 National Health Service (NHS) trusts in England have discontinued using Palantir Technologies’ waiting list management tools, raising questions about the reported success of the US company’s project aimed at reducing elective care backlogs.
NHS England has maintained that over 300,000 patients have been identified for removal from elective care waiting lists across 40 trusts benefiting from two hospital coordination tools developed on Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP). These tools are designed to improve the management of inpatient and outpatient waiting lists by providing a clearer overview of patient care needs.
However, an analysis based on freedom of information requests reveals that more than half of the trusts previously reported as using the Palantir tools no longer employ them to manage waiting lists. Moreover, scrutiny of another NHS England claim—that 1.2 million patients have been removed from waiting lists through the FDP’s “referral to treatment” tool—found most trusts cited an inability to quantify the tool’s impact. Among 31 trusts contributing data to this figure, more than 60 percent stated they could not measure benefits directly linked to the software, while 6 percent said they did not use the tool at all.
Several NHS trusts noted that discharge processing remained a manual task handled through existing hospital systems, with the FDP serving only as one component among multiple data inputs. This has fueled concerns that NHS England’s presentation of the data overstates Palantir’s contribution to reducing waiting list figures.
Former NHS England head of operational research and evaluation Charles Tallack said the analysis emphasizes a failure to account for what would have occurred without the platform, resulting in an exaggerated assessment of its benefits.
Palantir has responded by stating that the tools are most intensively used during initial implementation to clean legacy data errors, enabling trusts to better understand their patient cohorts and treatment needs.
The contract awarded to Palantir in 2023 for the FDP and its associated tools is valued at £330 million. Its use has attracted criticism due to the company’s connections to US and Israeli military operations. Amid rising pressure, UK government ministers are exploring domestic alternatives and considering activating a contractual break clause available from 2027.
In light of recent findings, the UK’s statistics regulator, the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), said it has opened an investigation into NHS England’s claims regarding the FDP. The OSR clarified that it does not regulate statements made by private sector companies.
NHS England stated that nearly 140 NHS organizations across the country have reported benefits from the platform’s diverse range of tools, which aim to improve coordination and patient care. Nonetheless, the emerging discrepancies underline ongoing concerns about the accuracy and transparency of data used to assess the FDP’s impact on addressing NHS waiting lists.