NHS employers may own the work NHS staff did within the Federated Data Platform, and they do, but when one former former NHS staffer writes “The Canonical Data Model belongs to the NHS, is licensed via the Open Government Licence, and is available to all on GitHub”, but omits to give the link which shows:

• the latest edit is from a “-PLTR” user;

• when you read the PDF, the word “palantir” is nowhere to be found – yet in the Model description itself palantir are everywhere, from:
  • “servers: – url: https://ptukhealth.palantirfoundry.co.uk” (it’s especially notable that this isn’t an nhs.uk address and doesn’t even reference the NHS – this is not NHS owned);
  • “paths: /api/v2/ontologies/palantirukhealth-ontology/objects/Admission”;
  • with over 1000 mentions of Foundry and over 1000 of Palantir, including:
    • “title: Palantir OpenAPI”;
    • “description: The Palantir REST API. Please see https://www.palantir.com/docs for more details.” 

That repository does not say how the PDF is built from the model, so it is impossible to tell (from outside the Palantir office) whether the difference between the PDF and spec is deliberate, an it is why open source matters in standards and specifications.

Some FDP advocates may claim that the ontology is owned by the NHS, but Palantir clearly has scope to disagree – and when it matters, the repeatedly litigious Palantir can and likely will deploy their lawyers to block use elsewhere with which they disagree. 

What to do about it

The NHS could deploy Claude to regenerate the ontology from NHS data, and update all the code, but that’s going around Palantir’s ownership of something the NHS doesn’t own or control – as to quote an FDP advocate: “The CDM would need to be reimplemented”, because the NHS doesn’t own or control it.

The CDM must be reimplemented by the NHS without touching any Palantir IP, and Palantir must certify that there are no Palantir rights engaged, before any NHS body signs any future contract with Palantir. If Palantir wishes to hold patients hostage the way FDP advocates suggest Palantir would hold cancer patients hostage, then that should encourage migration sooner rather than later.

Which is the core practical point of the criticism of Palantir and the current v1 FDP – Palantir can block patient benefits and limit NHS choices if it chose to. There are a few key chokepoints, and they must all be resolved (Cancer360 is the main patient facing one we cover elsewhere.)

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