NHSx

It’s really a data / information event that’s caught my attention this week, and the way folks are reacting to it on Twitter. It’s about NHSx.

NHSx is the testing and tracking app from the NHS. It’s designed to prevent a second mass wave of COVID-19.

The system tracks those who have contracted coronavirus and anyone they have been in contact with. It then asks them to self-isolate. This was rolled out across England last week.

They’ve also just released the NHS Covid-19 Reference Library, which describes the datasets they’re using, — It’s the information in what we would call the backend of the app.  — and this has created quite a lot of chatter online.

You see a lot of what you might expect:

• Consultation rates for influenza-like illness

• Covid-19 Hospitalisation — epidemiological data (demographics, risk factors and clinical information on severity and outcome) on COVID-19 infection in persons requiring hospitalisation and intensive care unit

• COVID related death information

• Inventory, orders and deliveries of PPE

But there’s also information that raises a few eyebrows:

• Discharge Situation Report — of all hospital admissions and discharges

• English Prescribing Dataset — detailed information on prescriptions issued in England, Wales and Scotland

• National Inventory & Deliveries from NHS Supply Chain

• NOMIS Census Data

• Record level 111 data — Information regarding each NHS 111 call — not aggregated

• Splunk 111 – Vodafone — Raw NHS 111 call data

• Segmentation — comorbidities for all patients in the master patient index

• Shielded Patient List — patients that are part of the shielding programme

• SUS+ ECDS NHS England New — Contains details on emergency care attendances, including to A&E and urgent care/walk-in centres

• ESR workforce — number of hospital staff employed by trust, including specialty and staff group, and a count of ambulance staff. Includes some information on training

• Workforce – Temporary/Bank Staff — datasource for all temporary staff employed in the NHS

• Allocate absence reports — absence reports of care providers

Many of these are new datasets, specifically for this app.

Why do people have a problem with all this? Well, the data is all being fed into the Palantir Foundry data platform — that’s Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, tied to the Donald Trump campaign, built on a business model of working in national security for countries around the world, and identified by Chris Wylie in his testimony to the select committee — Chris said multiple Palantir employees advised Cambridge Analytica on building an app to harvest data from Facebook that would ultimately be aggregated into a database licensed by several players, including a Koch Brothers operation, and the Republican National Committee.

So, data wonks are expressing concerns that the NHS health data is not exactly remaining sovereign. There’s huge potential for data harvesting around individual’s health data, something that’s currently seeing mass abuse in the United States political system.

The NHS says they’re GDPR compliant, but they also say who will be given access to the data: policy makers, commissioners, planners and researchers. But they say it’s ONLY for purposes related to Covid-19.

It’s an interesting product for a government to roll out, and an even more interesting decision to award the contract to Palantir — as well as Faculty, which Carole Cadwalladr reminded me this week, is the rebranded ASI.