| The NHS posesses the largest, most-complete collection of national medical and health data in the world. Certain senior managers have been trying to share that collection with private firms for years. There have been various contortions along the road; initially, the plan was that all GP surgeries would be required to upload patient data to the (shareable) national collection. The government partially backed down, allowing patients to opt out of that kind of sharing. A separate opt-out was required for data concerning hospital treatment. Both required patients to acquire and submit a paper form; there was no opt-out website. Then they changed the structure of the sharing system a little, rendering prior opt-outs moot; you had to opt-out again. You'd think the government would be able to make a lot of money out of this data; but one of the scandalous early deals they made was to sell the data of a million patients to the Society of Actuaries. For £3,000. Actuaries work for insurance companies; and insurance companies would dearly love to get their hands on people's health data. But £3,000? Now Palantir's core business is collecting data. It isn't a medical company. Corellating "anonymised" data is what they do. They are hostile to privacy, and they are famously secretive. There are people in government who want to privatize the NHS completely. Unfortunately for them, the NHS is probably the most popular institution in the UK; so they salami-slice. Various NHS services are privatized by stealth; the last CT scan I had was conducted in a van in the hospital carpark, run by some US health conglomerate. Various testing services have been fully privatized, with the original NHS services shut down. So there are two threads behind this story: the creeping privatisation of NHS services, and the involvement of this creepy company in handling patient data. |