UK Government to Extract Hospital Data to Palantir System without Patient Consent

[upnorth]

Content source

https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/04/uk_governement_set_to_extract/

The UK government is set to extract patient-identifiable data from NHS hospital systems and share this with its data platform based on technology from Palantir, a move that seems set to provoke another legal challenge.

Without consulting patients or giving them the choice of opting out, NHS England and NHS Improvement — the non-departmental government body which runs the NHS in England — has instructed NHS Digital to gather the data for the purpose of understanding and reducing the crisis in treatment waiting times resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. In NHS Digital board meeting papers (see Faster Data Flow - 3.1.2 - on page 163), NHS England instructs NHS Digital to "collect patient level identifiable data pertaining to admission, inpatient, discharge and outpatient activity from acute care settings on a daily basis."

The move is an expansion of NHS England's use of Palantir, which had been subject to the threat of a judicial review in 2021. Under legal pressure, the government caved in and agreed not to extend Palantir's contract beyond the pandemic without consulting the public.

UK hospital patient data set to enter Palantir system

'You'll be hearing from us,' say privacy campaigners who previously forced the government to back down

www.theregister.com

 

[enaph]

So UK government is giving away it's own citizens data to a shady US big data company. What could possibly go wrong.
Smells like Cambridge Analytica Scandal 2.0

 

[Stopspying]

This has been in the pipeline for some time. The NHS is in a mess, much of which is linked to austerity and underfunding from central government, who are trying to pay for their failings with patient data.