The UK government is determined to extract patient-identifiable recordsdata from NHS clinic systems and fragment this with its recordsdata platform in accordance with technology from Palantir, a lag that appears place to provoke one other simply challenge.

With out consulting sufferers or giving them the need of opting out, NHS England and NHS Enchancment — the non-departmental government body which runs the NHS in England — has advised NHS Digital to gain the recordsdata for the motive of working out and cutting back the disaster in therapy waiting cases as a result of COVID-19 pandemic.

In NHS Digital board assembly papers [PDF] (eye Faster Records Walk along with the lag – 3.1.2 – on online page 163), NHS England tells NHS Digital to “resolve patient stage identifiable recordsdata touching on admission, inpatient, discharge and outpatient process from acute care settings on a everyday foundation.”

The lag is a ramification of NHS England’s mumble of Palantir, which had been self-discipline to the risk of a judicial evaluate in 2021. Below simply strain, the government caved in and agreed not to lengthen Palantir’s contract previous the pandemic with out consulting the public.

The judicial evaluate was place to be brought by the news online page openDemocracy, backed by tech campaign community Foxglove.

Speaking to The Register, Foxglove director Cori Crider stated: “We’re very sharp that this newest lag to drive more patient recordsdata into Palantir has been carried out with zero public enter or consent. That’s not what we have been told would occur in our case, and we’re significantly sharp it is unlawful. The federal government shall be listening to from us almost in the present day.”

In the board papers, NHS England directs NHS Digital to make mumble of Foundry, a Palantir product for the sequence.

While NHS England owns the contractual relationship with Palantir, the unique instruction creates “a complex relationship” the place, when it involves recordsdata protection legislation, NHS Digital would possibly per chance be the recordsdata controller for the sequence nonetheless will mumble NHS England as a recordsdata processor and Palantir shall be a sub-processor, the doc stated.

NHS England stated that sufferers would not be allowed to block the switch of their recordsdata below the National Records Decide-outs programme since the recordsdata was due to be “anonymized in accordance with the Records Commissioner Predicament of work’s Anonymisation Code of Note before being launched.”

On the choice hand, the equivalent doc talks about the recordsdata being pseudonymized “to manufacture everyday products and companies” below the conception. And there is continually the hazard of pseudonymized recordsdata being deanonymized, and figuring out and documenting right folks, when additional info is brought into the combo.

In February 2022, the nation’s recordsdata watchdog, the Records Commissioner’s Predicament of work (ICO), printed draft steering on pseudonymization [PDF], that stated “…deepest recordsdata which have gone through pseudonymization, that would additionally simply be attributed to a natural particular person by formulation of additional recordsdata will have to be belief about to be recordsdata on an identifiable natural particular person…”

The steering followed the introduction of the EU’s General Records Protection Regulation, the local implementation of which (the UK GDPR) is below evaluate within the UK following Brexit. The proposed replace – the Records Protection and Digital Records Invoice (DPDIB) – is peaceful progressing through Parliament.

• UK government refuses public evaluate before open of NHS recordsdata platform
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• NHS recordsdata platform procurement delayed for a 2d time
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In a Twitter thread explaining the flaws with NHS England’s come Phil Sales space, coordinator of campaign community medConfidential, stated: “The real fact is that sufferers have a #RightToObject to the #processing of their #PersonalData, so – while @NHSEngland would possibly per chance presumably well well have to ignore of us’s opt-outs… and contorts itself to notify their recordsdata’s not ‘confidential patient recordsdata’ – the legislation(s) says in every other case.”

An NHS England spokesperson stated: “By amassing recordsdata in a more streamlined formulation the NHS is more healthy in a series to space and allocate sources to maximise outcomes for sufferers, while guaranteeing that recordsdata retain watch over stays with the NHS in any admire cases. In the end, it would possibly per chance well presumably well aid all NHS organizations to better notice their waiting lists and pressures in approach unswerving time, work as systems, and the burden of e book reporting on workers shall be significantly reduced.”

There are currently a file 6.3 million sufferers looking ahead to therapy within the NHS in England, with 2.54 million sufferers waiting more than 18 weeks. The median waiting cases remain “significantly greater” than pre-COVID ranges, NHS England stated, while a hidden backlog of sufferers but to new with stipulations would be even elevated.

In the board papers, NHS England calls the unique Palantir recordsdata initiative the Faster Records Programme. A separate Federated Records Platform is formally peaceful within the pipeline, even supposing the £360 million (c $406 million) procurement has been delayed by a entire lot of months. Palantir is declared to have made that opponents a “have to-mumble”, having recruited Indra Joshi and Harjeet Dhaliwal, key figures in NHS England’s recordsdata science and AI groups.

Palantir has equipped technology vulnerable by the CIA and controversial US immigration company ICE. ®