Adoption of FDP ‘progressing at pace’, says NHS England

Adoption of the federated data platform (FDP) is “progressing at pace”, according to an announcement from NHS England.

It follows criticism from health secretary Wes Streeting, in June 2024, about the “glacial” pace of adoption of the platform, which is planned to enable hospitals to bring together information from different clinical and HR systems in a single place.

NHSE awarded a £330 million contract to operate the FDP to US data analytics giant Palantir in November 2023, with a further contract awarded to KPMG in March 2024 to promote its adoption.

In a bulletin, dated 29 July 2024, Rebecca Llewellyn, FDP programme director at NHSE said: “It has been a busy couple of months for the programme; transition of trusts to the NHS FDP is progressing at pace with more trusts coming on board every day throughout summer”.

She added that the “transition stage” of the programme would be completed in September 2024 and there would be a move to a “delivery phase”.

“Our focus will shift to product enhancements and optimisation, wider product adoption and a continued focus on supporting new trusts and ICBs to onboard the NHS FDP,” Llewellyn said.

Kettering General Hospital and Northampton General Hospital were the first pilot hospitals to go live in May 2024.

The NHSE bulletin outlined how the FDP will provide trusts and ICBs with “a suite of nationally commissioned local products” to support the five key NHS priorities of elective recovery, care coordination, vaccination and immunisation, population health management, and supply chain management.

It said that each product has been developed “to address a particular NHS need” and tested and refined with pilot sites before being rolled out nationally.

There are currently four products available to trusts and ICSs which have the NHS FDP: referral to treatment validation pathway, inpatients care coordination solution, outpatients care coordination and discharge planning (OPTICA).

NHSE said that as new nationally commissioned products are developed, they will continue to be tested with pilot sites ahead of national roll-out.

In January 2024, NHSE said that it was “looking into” claims that Palantir had breached its contract to run the FDP by launching a covert influencer campaign targeting legal transparency non-profit Good Law Project.

The Good Law Project announced in February 2024 that it was taking legal action against NHSE because of the heavily redacted FDP contract with Palantir, which blacked out sections on the protection of personal data and references to financial reports on the FDP.

Campaigners from the group Health Workers for a Free Palestine, gathered outside the NHS Confed Expo in June 2024, to protest against Palantir’s strategic partnership with the Israeli Defence Ministry and call on NHSE to cancel the FDP contract.