Palantir: Databases

(asked on 24th March 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what was the process for selecting a company to provide the NHS England data platform; and which other companies they considered bids from before awarding the service to Palantir.


Answered by
Lord Markham Portrait
Lord Markham
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 11th April 2023

A procurement process for the ‘Provision of Data Management Platform Services’ was carried out by NHS England ahead of the contract award in December 2020, with a route to market evaluation identifying the G-Cloud 11 framework as the optimal route.

In line with the G-Cloud process, selection criteria helped to identify 19 suppliers with potential solutions. A process of clarification and evaluation informed by subject matter experts (SMEs) against agreed functional, non-functional, and financial criteria was carried out. The identity of bidders is not made public as this information is commercially sensitive.

The nine suppliers who met the minimum technical threshold were invited to give demonstrations in October 2020, following which they were evaluated against a set of criteria agreed by the SMEs. Palantir was subsequently selected as the preferred supplier based on receiving the highest score in the evaluation.

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