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Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’

223 points| disabled | 3 years ago |bloomberg.com

105 comments

order

3746648|3 years ago

Bloomberg used to be better. This is basically a non-story. The 'secret plan' was to use the nefarious mechanism of... Buying access that was for sale. All the allusions to shadyhandedness are just there to justify the existence of a story about Palantir because the author knew a story about a controversial company would propagate better even if it was devoid of anything meaningful to say.

anonymousDan|3 years ago

This is so disingenuous. The whole point is that in a publicly funded health system many people disagree with this access being available in the first place. The UK government tries to paint a picture whereby giving such access will allow a raft of plucky UK startups to revitalize the NHS, when in reality we are just handing over our data and taxpayer money to the likes of Palantir.

skippyboxedhero|3 years ago

It is the subject: NHS, Peter Thiel, CIA, Silicon Valley, privatization...the media coverage on this sort of stuff in the UK is deranged.

Palantir is just offering a "shiny dashboard", we should build your own...it is that easy, just knock up a Palantir competitor in a weekend (the NHS has decent tech units, but core NHS is like this...they hire £20k "devs", ask why they are getting hacked all the time, nothing works properly..."this tech stuff is all just rubbish"...it is like the late 90s).

The author spends an article outlining an elaborate plot then slips in that Palantir didn't actually manage to acquire anyone...and was working with the NHS years before this email was sent (and provided valuable support during Covid).

The irony is that this media coverage explains why healthcare tech is so bad in the UK (there is actually a listed company, worth £10m+...that is just a staff directory for hospitals, it is pre-MySpace tech, and tons of trusts use it...it is actually comic).

LightG|3 years ago

Horsesh!t, greeney ... Palantir are controversial for a reason. And so I want to know everything single thing about them even tangentially touching the NHS so I know how to fight against it.

But thanks for your input.

atoav|3 years ago

There are not few companies that do more damage to the societies on earth than they do good. Palantir must be easily in one of the top places of the worst offenders.

A_D_E_P_T|3 years ago

Their products are fairly mundane and seem ethically neutral in themselves, so why do you suppose this is?

There are probably thousands of companies that do more damage to society than Palantir. For e.g., every company associated with an unhealthy vice, like alcohol, tobacco, opioids, and especially gambling.

missedthecue|3 years ago

What does Palantir do? What do customers pay them for?

whalesalad|3 years ago

This is a pretty common practice in all sorts of industries. If you can’t compete somewhere, you buy someone who is already competing.

gsatic|3 years ago

There has been talk of an EU version of Palantir for a while now. Anyone know what the latest news is? Technically it doesnt look like there is anything too complex about what Foundary does.

gberger|3 years ago

Helsing https://helsing.ai/ is gearing up to be the Palantir of Europe - at least in the military AI field. One of its cofounders was a software architect at Palantir.

badrabbit|3 years ago

Do people know you can do wjat palantir does with Splunk?

enviclash|3 years ago

Indeed the tasks described in the article were not tough nuts, which is surprising.

iLoveOncall|3 years ago

Palantir is a contracting company. What do you mean by an "EU version of Palantir"? It doesn't make sense.

wuschel|3 years ago

What do you mean by EU-Version? A EU spin-off, or competitor?

w0mbat|3 years ago

One employee suggests doing X in an email is not the same as “company has secret plan to do X”.

mhh__|3 years ago

NHS should be aggressively acquiring data science talent.

Unfortunately current gov doesn't give a shit about anything other than next week (science funding being cut to boost growth somehow)

finikytou|3 years ago

do airbus and palantir now bloomberg

collegeburner|3 years ago

oh no, strategic m&a to enter a new market, getting a customer base and acquihiring a team with local experience? that's evil!

i have lots of issues with palantir's applications spying on law abiding citizens and expanding government power but, uhh, this aint it chief.

anonymousDan|3 years ago

I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. The NHS is supposed to be a public service, but to undermine public support for it the UK government have been slowly trying to hack off bits of it to give to the private sector and strategically underfunding it. If they could get away with it they would probably sell the NHS down the river to US healthtech in order to get a US trade deal. So people are rightly sensitive to anything that appears to point to large private sector companies gaining an increased foothold in the NHS

jonnybgood|3 years ago

Note that Palantir doesn’t spy on anything. It’s a shiny dashboard placed on top of an organization’s database. That’s all it is. Palantir does not provide data. It is the customer’s data.

paganel|3 years ago

> that's evil!

Not a Brit, so not directly involved, but, yes, letting private enterprise sneaking their way in into a government-run health system is the beginning of pure evil.

funstuff007|3 years ago

There's much to not like about Palantir. I'm particularly averse to the extreme puffery regarding their tech's abilities, but buying your way into a market is far from nefarious.