I spent a while on the Palantir NHS story for a documentary I've just finished, and I came out of it able to explain the contract and the politics but not the thing that probably matters most to people here, which is whether the software is any good to actually use.

What I could pin down:

The contract is £330m over seven years, signed in 2023, with a break clause in 2027. At the end of January there were 110 trusts live or in delivery, against a target of 85% of all trusts by March. NHS England publishes its own impact figures for it: 35% reduction in delayed discharge days, and an average of 114 extra elective procedures a month per acute trust using it.

Then in June the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee called Palantir's position across the public sector an "unacceptable point of weakness" and told the government to use the break clause and either build in-house or find a UK supplier.

The bit I found most interesting is the bit I can't interpret. HSJ reported that a lot of the biggest and most prestigious trusts still hadn't started using it, despite pressure from the centre. There are two readings of that and I genuinely don't know which is right. Either the trusts with the strongest analytics teams looked at it properly and weren't impressed, or they already have things that work and there's nothing in it for them.

That distinction matters more than it sounds, because of how the thing is built. Palantir aren't selling a dashboard that sits over your existing systems. They build a model of how the organisation actually operates, on site, and then decisions start running through it. Which means exit cost scales with how long you've been on it. A trust that never adopted has nothing to unpick in 2027. A trust three years deep does.

So, two questions. If your trust is on it, is it any good? And if your trust isn't, do you know whether that was an actual decision or just drift?

Full disclosure, the documentary is mine: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldFcwL3vn1Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldFcwL3vn1Y). Happy to be told I've got the wrong end of this.

Made a documentary about Palantir's NHS contract. The thing I couldn't answer is whether the software is actually any good.