WTF is the FDP?
A deep dive into the most polarising technology that many wish wasn't.
Hello insiders. A confession from me to start this weekâs pieceâŠ
Despite being in healthtech, talking about healthtech and writing about healthtech, Iâve not really had anything interesting to say on the FDP for (genuinely) being unsure of what it actually is. I knew it was NHS technology and some sort of data sandbox or warehouse or sandcastle or something, but not much beyond that.
So I thought âwhy not invite someone who built the thing onto a podcast to chat about it.â And the below is a summary of everything I researched before and after, and everything I learned on that podcast. Enjoy.
Letâs start with what the FDP actually is.
The FDP, which stands for Federated Data Platform, is something that people in and around the NHS and technology have been talking about for ages and itâs okay if youâre cagey on the details - itâs not explained particularly well anywhere Iâve seen to be honest.
My understanding⊠itâs the result of a pretty basic, first-principles idea that dataâs all over the place in the NHS which sucks, so how about we centralise it so we know more stuff about it, can do more stuff with it, and we can build more tech stuff based on it that all of us in the NHS can use.
With me so far? Sounds like a good idea. An essential one really.
NHS England describes it as âconnecting vital health information across the NHS, helping staff deliver better care for patients and work more efficiently.â Predictably vague, ok, but, again, what actually is the technology?
Well⊠itâs one piece of software, installed separately inside each NHS organisation (hence âfederatedâ), with a set of apps sitting on top of it that each do a specific job. NHS England calls these âproductsâ and theyâre things like referral to treatment validation, inpatient and outpatient care coordination, theatre and bed planning, and discharge tracking.
Itâs useful, relatively unglamorous, admin-type stuff and, ok, nobodyâs curing disease directly with a bed state dashboard, but if youâve ever met a discharge coordinator on a Friday afternoon or heaven forbid you have a patient in a bed they want, youâll absolutely know why thatâs useful.
In case youâre trying to visualise this, it isnât exactly a national database / sandbox / sandcastle either. Each trust has its own separate FDP instance and stays the data controller for its own data. NHS England is only the data controller for the national instance. That means everyoneâs medical records arenât just sloshing around in a single place. Your trustâs data stays in your trustâs box.
Also worth saying is that GP data isnât in it. Separate issue.
The benefits
Tom Bartlett spent 20 years inside NHS data teams, ran NHS Englandâs data engineering function, took over the FDP team in January 2024 and left earlier this year. Since leaving, heâs since written some pretty eye watering and honest blogs about the experience. His description of the tech and its benefits are pretty convincing thoughâŠ
âItâs the standardisation of data across the NHS for the first time, which means staff can move between Trusts and be productive immediately, Trusts can share code and products with each other, and technology companies can build once and deploy everywhere.
The Canonical Data Model provides a translation layer that allows data collected in different applications and different organisations to come together and be used in single applications.â
However, almost every MP who has spoken on it, Tom says, describes a data warehouse, which is pretty reductive because itâs easier to attack for other reasons when youâre not appropriately attributing its benefits. A data warehouse tells you what happened last month, whereas operational software tells a clinician what to do on a ward, now.
On the podcast we did together, Tom talked through multiple examples of outrageous existing processes that would be relics of the past if the FDP got goingâŠ
A hospital board round where the team projects a spreadsheet of patient names onto the wall, because updating each record in the electronic patient record would take eight clicks across different screens and would burn the whole half hour they have.
Nurses walking wards with printouts annotated in biro.
Staff at <redacted (but could literally be any) hospital> queueing on a Friday afternoon for the one working computer.
Discharge decisions made by phone between two hospitals, tracked on a whiteboard.
Nice. So whatâs the problem?
The reason none of this is simple is that NHS England awarded the contract in November 2023 to a consortium led by Palantir Technologies UK, alongside Accenture, PwC, Carnall Farrar and NECS.
ÂŁ330m
Funding for up to 240 NHS organisations
Formally starting in March 2024
ÂŁ330m doesnât sound like a lot when you consider that 20 years and roughly ÂŁ2bn of electronic patient record deployments later, only about 30% of clinicians say their EPR helps them do their job. The FDP sounds like a fantastic deal in that context for all the potential benefit, no? (That was a figure Tom cited on the podcast by the way).
The issue is that Palantir is far from a normal supplierâŠ
