NHS joins forces with US tech giants to create COVID-19 dashboard

The NHS is working with US tech companies Palantir, Microsoft and Amazon to develop a data platform to inform the COVID-19 response.

According to a blog posted on Gov.UK, NHS England and Improvement will collate data from across NHS and social care organisation sources, including the NHS 111 call centre, NHS Digital and COVID-19 test result date from Public Health England.

Data will be integrated, cleaned and harmonised in order to “provide a single source of truth about the rapidly evolving situation”, which can be presented on dashboards to give a live view of metrics.

However, Privacy International and the Open Rights Group issued a statement raising concerns about the involvement of Palantir, which is providing its Palantir Foundry software, to power the front-end data platform. They flagged up the firm’s past work on the tracking of migrants and provision of espionage tools.

Jim Killock, executive director of Open Rights Group, urged the NHS to be “extremely