It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.

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imdsm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I suppose the issue is that the NHS themselves have historically been terrible at managing their software. Nobody I know who I rate as even mediocre and above would or have worked at the NHS, and those I do know who have have, I wouldn't hire into junior roles.

I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is. GP surgery's have for years had to send paper files across to new practices when a patient moves. The new NHS app is great, but I can see from my history that > 90% is missing.

Another great example of how good the NHS is at this, is the fact that nurses & doctors would have to scroll down a combo list without any typeahead to pick a medication, which would be in an A-Z list of every medication ever.

So, closing the circle, is there a reason to bring in a company that hires people at and above our level of competence, who have the expertise to implement a system to bring the NHS out of the dark ages of IT? Yes. There are many.

There will always be concerns about data, about security, but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it than an unknown company getting billions in contracts, building software worse than someone with a $20 Claude extension, and then leaking it to hackers.

Just my 2p

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forgotusername6 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Internal restrictions are such that even aspiring software Devs find hurdles to doing basic automation. I know someone who wanted to use python, yes just use it, and it took months to be allowed to do that on an NHS machine.

	▲	jjgreen 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Does it run on Windows 95?

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nicoburns 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I have no doubt that it's an extremely complicated mixture of 100s of systems, but anyone who has lived here knows how terrible it is.

Yep, as someone who's worked at a couple of small startups trying to sell into the NHS, it's terrible. A big part of the problem seems to be that there's no centralised procurement: each trust (of which there are ~200) does their own precurement. And a lot of the companies (the big established players are the worst) at most pay lip service interoperability. So you end with a big mess of system that don't talk to each other.

And they're not setup to pay "market rates" that are competitive with private employers to their in-house developers. So it's hard for them to attract and retain good in-house developers where they have them (although there are still some great people working there).

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RobotToaster an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Imagine the kind of open source EPR that could be built with £330 million.

But it looks like lobbying by US corporations has resulted in the NHS quietly deleting it's open source policy https://www.digitalhealth.net/2025/12/nhs-england-quietly-re...

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philipwhiuk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> but I'd much rather data be in the hands of a corporation that doesn't leak it

So would I and I think Palantir will leak it.

	▲	basket_horse an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Is there any proof that Palantir has ever leaked client data? From a security perspective they are one of the few companies that hold IL6, which means they can handle highly classified/top secret information. They work with many international governments and companies, and I would imagine any sort of unapproved leak would be disastrous for their brand.

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Closi an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> It seems a bad idea in the first place for a public organization to award a single company a huge contract for both the software licences and all the consultancy and implementation efforts.

I'm not 100% convinced that the consultancy/implementation being the same as the software vendor is a bad thing.

Depending on the contract it can give you better exit clauses, implementation costs can be subsidised by SaaS revenue, you might have novel clauses for PS overspends, you get rid of the 'implementation vendor blames software vendor' thing, if you need modifications/enhancements to the base product then it sits with the same person, plus we don't know if Palantir's system is easily made for an independent implementation consultant to pick it up and be able to do everything without having to do some backend magic.