Health service told to ensure ministers don't mistake before-and-after comparisons for cause and effect
The UK's statistical regulator has told NHS England to ensure ministers are briefed accurately following a row over data used to promote the purported benefits of a Palantir-run platform. The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) said the health quango had accepted that it needed to communicate more clearly about data purporting to measure the benefits of the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), which is based on the US spy-tech firm's technology under a £330 million contract."We expect NHS England to ensure that any figures cited by ministers or in official briefings about the FDP and its effectiveness are communicated in a clear, accurate manner," the OSR said.
Campaign group Foxglove called on health officials and ministers to correct the record with Parliament and the media on data used to illustrate the FDP's success.
Earlier this month, the OSR, part of the UK Statistics Authority, said it was assessing how NHS England used data to make claims about the FDP's performance, which sometimes made its way into ministerial statements. The move followed a Freedom of Information request from Foxglove, which found that nearly a third of NHS trusts using Palantir's health data platform were performing fewer patient procedures than before it went live.Foxglove also said Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust accounted for 84 percent of the reported fall in outpatient waiting lists, while only 16 trusts were using the tool provided by Palantir.The results sit uneasily alongside NHS England's claim that, as of June, 139 trusts used the FDP, with 137 reporting benefits. Another commonly quoted data item found that an Inpatient Care Coordination Solution (CCS) tool based on the FDP had resulted in 111,589 additional patients undergoing procedures in operating theaters. Writing to James Murray, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Foxglove noted that NHS England had said in documentation that it was inappropriate to "draw conclusions about cause and effect as other variables have not been controlled for" in its published FDP data.Foxglove said: "The claim that Palantir's FDP has delivered a large number of additional operations has been widely repeated."At the time, the OSR said it was assessing the information around NHS England's claims about the FDP's performance.Publishing its response yesterday, the regulator said it had engaged NHS England statisticians and conducted its own desk research based on information provided by the NHS and others who raised concerns about data used to promote the FDP's benefits.
