Palantir ‘AI director’ to join NHSE/DHSC board

The need for AI decision support has been identified by DHSC permanent secretary Sam Jones following a series of recent policy blunders.

The latest of these involved the national provider improvement programme, which was launched on 4 March after more than a year’s work by NHSE. It was effectively scrapped and replaced by the new intensive recovery programme just three weeks later.

Poor communication between NHSE and DHSC executives has been blamed for the confusion. The service is currently ran by two parallel boards – one for each organisation – which share some members.

The board decision support tool being developed by Palantir takes advantage of ambient voice technology, which is being increasingly used in healthcare to record patient consultations and feed the transcripts into electronic records. The increased use of AVT was promoted in the government’s 10-YearHealth Plan as a way to boost productivity.

Tools such as the Nuance Dragon version of Microsoft’s Copilot AI are combining transcription with access to best practice databases to provide clinical advice to doctors during consultations.

At the same time, large companies are making use of AI tools such as Diligent Boards and Board Intelligence to improve the quality of their decision-making.

Palantir’s own Foundry product is being used by BP to “enhance operational performance”. A new “strategic partnership” between the Ministry of Defence and Palantir seeks to “accelerate decision-making”.

Palantir, of course, provides the technology for the NHS’s federated data platform.

The NHSE/DHSC decision support tool is being trained on an evidence base of successful health policy interventions prepared by consultants McKinsey. Paul Dinkin, DHSC director general for strategy and healthcare policy, and former McKinsey partner, is overseeing the work.

When fully developed, the tool will run in the background of NHSE/DHSC top team meetings. It will provide context for discussions and identify where decisions are likely to lead to poor outcomes or clash with previous policies.

The project developing the tool is known as System Knowledge Integration Network for evidence-based Transformation. However, HSJ understands it is commonly referred to as “Milly”, in reference to DHSC lead non-exec director and former health secretary Alan Milburn.

There has been considerable debate within the SKINeT team about which policy should be used to train “Milly”. A greater weighting has been given to policy developed between 2000 and 2008, but it has proved very hard to adjust the strategy for the difference in funding available then and now.

Guard rails have been put in place to ensure the views of Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel on the NHS are not included in the evidence base.

Reactions from NHSE and DHSC leaders to trials of the new “AI director” have been mixed. One senior political source told HSJ: “It’s ridiculous to think a machine could make better policy than we can – a quarter of the population are now satisfied with the NHS, I’d like to see AI do better than that.”

However, another member of the joint exec team said: “As long as it helps me get back home and away from these southern divvies as quickly as possible, then it’s alright by me.”

Rumours that long-term SKINeT plans involve “terminating” all executive functions in the DHSC and eventually the wider UK government have been denied.