Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what discussions he has had with NHS England on its data cleaning specification for Palantir; and whether that specification defines how patient data are (a) extracted, (b) transformed and (c) loaded into the federated data platform.

NHS England has not had any discussions with my Rt Hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on this matter.

Each local organisation has their own instance of the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) for which they are the data controller, and can opt into any of the core products that support delivery of patient care.

Local organisations can connect and share information currently stored in separate systems to support staff to access the information they need in one safe and secure environment, where there is a legal basis to do so.

Data is only ingested into an FDP Tenant following establishment of the legal basis and a specific purpose for usage of that data. Most commonly this is for use in FDP products, for example those which support the management of waiting lists, theatre scheduling, or effective discharge of patients.

Data is extracted, cleaned, enriched, and transformed according to the requirements of each use case or product. The FDP program uses the concept of the NHS Canonical Data Model to ensure that data is treated consistently across FDP Tenants, and this enables the development of consistent, reusable products.

Prior to ingestion from the source systems to the FDP Tenant, the NHS-Privacy Enhancing Technology (NHS-PET) service registers the flow. NHS-PET is a standalone service located between primary data sources and the FDP-Associated Services (AS) platform, providing a data orchestration and privacy service for FDP-AS data ingress and inter-tenant transfers.

The NHS-PET service creates records of the types and uses of data which are used in every instance of NHS FDP. If the data is to be used for secondary uses, not direct care, the NHS-PET service can treat personal data to remove identifiers utilising techniques such as anonymisation, masking, generalisation, and pseudonymisation. Privacy treated data is modelled by FDP-AS and is then made available for specific purposes.