The Single English County Saying No to Palantir

唯一对 Palantir 说“不”的英国郡县

The UK government has six months to decide whether to terminate a deal worth more than $400 million between the country’s National Health Service and American software company Palantir. If one part of the NHS is already doing without Palantir, politicians are asking, why can’t the rest of the country? 英国政府还有六个月的时间来决定是否终止英国国家医疗服务体系（NHS）与美国软件公司 Palantir 之间价值超过 4 亿美元的合同。政客们不禁发问：如果 NHS 的一部分已经可以在没有 Palantir 的情况下运作，为什么全国其他地区不能呢？

In 2023, the UK commissioned Palantir to develop a “federated data platform” (FDP) that could ingest and organize the tangle of health data produced across the country. According to Palantir and the NHS, the new system is already cutting wait times and the length of hospital stays, and maximizing the use of operating theatres. 2023 年，英国委托 Palantir 开发一个“联邦数据平台”（FDP），旨在整合并梳理全国各地产生的错综复杂的健康数据。据 Palantir 和 NHS 称，该新系统已经缩短了等待时间和住院时长，并最大限度地提高了手术室的利用率。

But lately, as Palantir technology is deployed in theaters of war and the US administration’s immigration crackdown, its deal with the NHS has become a flashpoint in the UK, drawing protests, petitions, parliamentary inquiries, and a reported rebellion among NHS workers. Other European nations, increasingly at loggerheads with the Trump administration, are also reevaluating their relationships with Palantir in a bid to minimize their dependence on US-made technology. 但近来，随着 Palantir 的技术被部署在战争前线以及美国政府的移民打击行动中，其与 NHS 的协议已成为英国的一个矛盾焦点，引发了抗议、请愿、议会质询，据报道 NHS 工作人员内部也出现了抵制情绪。其他欧洲国家因与特朗普政府的关系日益紧张，也在重新评估与 Palantir 的合作，试图最大限度地减少对美国制造技术的依赖。

The health care board for one part of England, Greater Manchester, has repeatedly declined to adopt Palantir’s FDP, choosing to stick with a home-spun platform developed over the best part of a decade. The board claims it doesn’t need Palantir, that its own platform is functionally superior and more trusted by the public. “[Even] a technically strong platform will struggle to realize value if clinicians, data controllers, patients or the public do not trust it,” Matt Hennessey, chief data and analytics officer at NHS Greater Manchester, tells WIRED. “If we were to fully adopt the FDP … it would be a retrograde step.” 英格兰大曼彻斯特地区的医疗委员会多次拒绝采用 Palantir 的 FDP，选择继续使用其耗时近十年自主开发的平台。该委员会声称他们不需要 Palantir，并认为其自有平台在功能上更胜一筹，且更受公众信任。NHS 大曼彻斯特地区首席数据与分析官 Matt Hennessey 对《连线》（WIRED）表示：“如果临床医生、数据控制者、患者或公众不信任它，那么即使是一个技术上强大的平台也难以实现其价值。如果我们全面采用 FDP……那将是一种倒退。”

That claim—disputed by Palantir and other FDP advocates—has fed into a national debate over whether the government should seize an opportunity next February to terminate the NHS contract early, instead of allowing it to run until 2031. 这一说法遭到了 Palantir 和其他 FDP 支持者的反驳，并引发了一场全国性的辩论：政府是否应该抓住明年二月的机会提前终止 NHS 合同，而不是让其持续到 2031 年。

For decades, NHS workers have used a combination of digital systems, spreadsheets, paper, and whiteboards to keep track of patients. Sometimes, when a patient moves from one care setting to another, their treatment records are left behind with occasionally deadly consequences. Without a way for different types of care providers to share information effectively, NHS administrators have had to base funding and resource allocation decisions on an incomplete patchwork of data. Palantir’s FDP is meant to change all that. 几十年来，NHS 工作人员一直使用数字系统、电子表格、纸张和白板的组合来跟踪患者信息。有时，当患者从一个护理机构转到另一个机构时，他们的治疗记录会被遗漏，这有时会导致致命的后果。由于缺乏一种让不同类型的护理提供者有效共享信息的方法，NHS 管理人员不得不基于不完整的数据拼凑来做出资金和资源分配决策。Palantir 的 FDP 正是为了改变这一切而设计的。

The NHS began to roll out the FDP in early 2024. The platform consists of a national pool of health data meant to help identify care deficiencies, and a bunch of local databases that individual regions can use to perform analyses and develop tools specific to their needs—say, waitlist management or discharge planning. The various components all share the same underlying technology scaffolding, in theory making it possible for tools developed in one corner of the country to be readily adopted in another. NHS 于 2024 年初开始推广 FDP。该平台由一个全国性的健康数据池组成，旨在帮助识别护理缺陷，并包含一系列本地数据库，各地区可以使用这些数据库进行分析并开发满足其特定需求的工具——例如候补名单管理或出院计划。各个组件共享相同的底层技术架构，理论上使得在一个地区开发的工具可以轻松地被另一个地区采用。

“You can lift and shift. That’s the real power of the FDP,” says Tom Bartlett, an independent IT consultant who previously oversaw the national-level FDP rollout as deputy director of data engineering at NHS England. “The other advantage is that you’ve got a surface for artificial intelligence to work across.” “你可以直接迁移。这就是 FDP 的真正威力所在，”曾任英国 NHS 数据工程副主任并负责全国 FDP 推广的独立 IT 顾问 Tom Bartlett 表示，“另一个优势是，你拥有了一个可以让人工智能在整个系统上运行的平台。”

Within the sprawling NHS, two types of organizations can access the FDP: trusts that run hospitals and local care, and integrated care boards (ICBs), responsible for planning and commissioning health care services at a regional level. Both use data for different purposes, but share the ultimate goal of improving patient care. 在庞大的 NHS 体系内，两类组织可以访问 FDP：负责运营医院和本地护理的信托机构，以及负责区域层面医疗服务规划和委托的综合护理委员会（ICB）。两者使用数据的目的不同，但最终目标都是改善患者护理。

NHS figures show 139 of roughly 200 trusts currently “live” with Palantir’s technology, while 35 of England’s 36 ICBs are actively using the system. “It is clear that thousands more patients are benefitting from the FDP every month,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care tells WIRED. NHS 数据显示，在大约 200 个信托机构中，有 139 个目前正在“使用”Palantir 的技术，而英格兰 36 个 ICB 中有 35 个正在积极使用该系统。英国卫生与社会保障部的一位发言人告诉《连线》：“显而易见，每个月有成千上万的患者从 FDP 中受益。”

But trusts in different pockets of England have resisted the FDP, including in Greater Manchester, where sources claim they are using it for limited purposes only. “They’re not going all in,” claims Andy Haywood, chief digital and data officer at research institute Health Innovation Manchester. “On the spreadsheet they go down as using it, but not in the sense of putting all their data in it.” (Palantir claims that trusts in Greater Manchester are using the FDP extensively.) Greater Manchester—the birthplace of the NHS in the industrial north of England—is also the sole region whose care board has repeatedly and categorically refused to adopt Palantir’s platform. 但英格兰不同地区的信托机构对 FDP 进行了抵制，包括大曼彻斯特地区，有消息称他们仅将该系统用于有限的用途。“他们并没有全力投入，”研究机构 Health Innovation Manchester 的首席数字与数据官 Andy Haywood 声称，“在电子表格上他们被记录为正在使用，但并不是指将所有数据都放入其中。”（Palantir 则声称大曼彻斯特的信托机构正在广泛使用 FDP。）大曼彻斯特——这个位于英格兰工业北部、NHS 的诞生地——也是唯一一个其护理委员会多次且明确拒绝采用 Palantir 平台的地区。

Instead, Greater Manchester ICB, which covers a population of around 3 million, has stuck with its homegrown Analytics and Data Science Platform (ADSP). At a meeting in May 2025, despite pressure from the national unit of the NHS to adopt Palantir’s technology, the board concluded that its “local capability exceeds anything the FDP currently offers” and some of its functionalities are “two–three years” ahead. The board’s resolve has only hardened since. 相反，覆盖约 300 万人口的大曼彻斯特 ICB 一直坚持使用其自主开发的分析与数据科学平台（ADSP）。在 2025 年 5 月的一次会议上，尽管面临 NHS 国家部门要求采用 Palantir 技术的压力，该委员会仍得出结论，认为其“本地能力超过了 FDP 目前提供的任何功能”，且部分功能“领先两到三年”。此后，该委员会的决心愈发坚定。

The ADSP is fed with primary care data that is not available on Palantir’s platform, and because the system was developed in-house, it can supposedly be reconfigured more easily. “Because the ADSP is a collection of technologies, if we found that our data visualization software had become less than best in class, we could swap it out,” Hennessey tells WIRED. ADSP 接入了 Palantir 平台上无法获取的初级保健数据，而且由于该系统是内部开发的，据称可以更轻松地进行重新配置。“因为 ADSP 是一系列技术的集合，如果我们发现我们的数据可视化软件不再是一流的，我们可以将其替换掉，”Hennessey 告诉《连线》。

The ADSP also benefits from a deep public trust in the platform fostered over multiple years, Hennessey claims, meaning people are more likely to volunteer the sensitive health data required for this kind of platform to function. Hennessey 声称，ADSP 还受益于多年来建立的深厚公众信任，这意味着人们更愿意主动提供此类平台运行所需的敏感健康数据。

Palantir says there is scant independent evidence to suggest the ADSP has contributed directly to improving patient care or saving costs—and that its own platform is widely trusted. Palantir 表示，几乎没有独立证据表明 ADSP 对改善患者护理或节省成本有直接贡献，并坚称其自身平台深受广泛信任。