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Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’
- collegeburner 4y agooh 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.
- jonnybgood 4y agoNote 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.
- stuaxo 4y agoThey are ethically dubious as it the man behind it, why on earth would you give them access to a countries worth of public health data.
- mhoad 4y agoNote that you are incredibly wrong https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.12613/8070/IliadisEtAl-JournalArticle-2022-08.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.1261...
- anonymousDan 4y agoI 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
- timellis-smith 4y agoDo you have any evidence for this or are you just sprouting tired old anti-government rhetoric. > Overall, there is no evidence of a significant increase in spending on private providers or widespread privatisation of services in recent years. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/articles/big-election-questions-nhs-privatised-2021 https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/articles/big-elect...
- stuaxo 4y agoYou really don't have to look very far it's really well known. Just look up the NHS and public private partnership. The numbers were cooked from the beginning to make it look cheaper, see issues of private eye from around the y2k till about now.
- paganel 4y 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.
- missedthecue 4y agoIt doesn't sound like they're sneaking their way in. It sounds like they are acquiring private enterprises that already deal with the NHS, therefore getting exposure to that market. The private enterprise relationship with the NHS already exists before Palantir acquired it. The NHS isn't completely vertically integrated. They buy their gowns, needles, rubber gloves, thermometers, and bedsheets from for-profit companies too. Is that "pure evil"?
- paganel 4y agoIn a way, yes, especially the medical-related things.
- collegeburner 4y agohow is publicly acquiring a company, then entering a competitive bid priced against competition, "sneaking in"? nobody's sneaking here.
- nieve 4y agoUn-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/ghdS3 https://archive.ph/ghdS3
- 3746648 4y agoBloomberg 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.
- LightG 4y agoHorsesh!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.
- skippyboxedhero 4y agoIt 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).
- anonymousDan 4y agoSo **ing what if UK healthtech isn't up to silicon valley 'standards'. As if the US healthcare system is anything to be envious of.
- drstewart 4y ago
- gsatic 4y agoThere 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.
- enviclash 4y agoIndeed the tasks described in the article were not tough nuts, which is surprising.
- sva_ 4y agoIn Germany, the latest news is that it'll cost significantly more than they initially claimed (14 mil -> 40 mil) https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/landespolitik/nrw-polizei-datenbank-software-palantir-kosten-100.html https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/landespolitik/nrw-polizei-da...
- dewey 4y agoWho would've expected that!
- _8j50 4y agoDo people know you can do wjat palantir does with Splunk?
- jonnybgood 4y agoA lot of people don’t know what Palantir does. Only what they’ve heard.
- fmsf 4y agomaybe this helps https://youtube.com/channel/UCQRc3PMlCsoodxbR4IsglKQ https://youtube.com/channel/UCQRc3PMlCsoodxbR4IsglKQ
- sangnoir 4y agoWell, I've heard Palintir is no better than any other body-shop: hype-up their tech/senior engineering acumen, get the contract and throw anyone with a pulse at the project while using boring technology (SQL, spreadsheets).
- whalesalad 4y agoThis is a pretty common practice in all sorts of industries. If you can’t compete somewhere, you buy someone who is already competing.
- atoav 4y agoThere 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 4y agoTheir 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 4y agoWhat does Palantir do? What do customers pay them for?
- fooker 4y agoDashboards. That’s it.
- hef19898 4y agoNah, also white washing data access in cases were a private company can get data and governments cannot.
- robertkoss 4y agoIt seems like you know nothing about the product at all.
- ethanbond 4y agoIn the same way that pharma companies produce “powder. That’s it.” or in the way that oil companies produce “liquid. That’s it.” or in the way that Apple produces “rectangles. That’s it.”
- mhoad 4y agoThat isn’t true and we both know it https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.12613/8070/IliadisEtAl-JournalArticle-2022-08.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://scholarshare.temple.edu/bitstream/handle/20.500.1261...
- w0mbat 4y agoOne employee suggests doing X in an email is not the same as “company has secret plan to do X”.
- finikytou 4y agodo airbus and palantir now bloomberg
- funstuff007 4y agoThere'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.
- mhh__ 4y agoNHS 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)