Palantir's NHS cancer app gets plenty of praise, precious few users
Only a handful of NHS trusts are using the cancer app on the controversial 330 million Federated Data Platform (FDP) run by Palantir, while newly released figures raise questions about which trusts are benefiting.
Cancer 360 was designed to bring cancer patients' data from disparate spreadsheets and electronic health records into a central system, helping health professionals prioritize treatment.
Pilots began four years ago, and trusts are not charged directly for the FDP. Yet official figures put Cancer 360's uptake at just five or six trusts. Freedom of Information responses gathered by grassroots campaign group No Palantir in the NHS also reveal discrepancies between reported benefits and recorded use.
In June 2025, NHS England said that Cancer 360 "drastically cut down diagnosis times" and referred to a pilot at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust, which saw the proportion of patients diagnosed within 28 days climb from 72 percent to 85 percent.
The trust began trials in 2022, while working with Palantir under a 23 million contract awarded without competition, before the US firm was awarded the FDP contract in late 2023. Critics argued the FDP procurement was flawed as Palantir had developed use cases under 60 million in non-competitive contracts which were then carried over to the FDP.
Last year, NHS England said Cancer 360 served 46 registered teams and 239 active users, and processed 52,000 patients.
In June 2026, NHS England said there were five trusts using Cancer 360 as of March 2026. Of those, only two were listed as benefiting. In July, health minister Preet Kaur Gill repeated the five-trust usage figure in a Parliamentary answer.
Official data released in October said that as of June, six trusts were using Cancer 360 and five were benefiting, but did not identify the trusts or explain the increase. The stats have since been removed from the NHS England website but are archived here.
In June, NHS England responded to a Freedom of Information request. It said six trusts reported unique users logging into the Cancer 360 app over the last 12 months.
However, two trusts cited as having run successful pilots - Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and Royal United Hospitals Bath - were listed as having zero unique users logging into the system during that period, according to NHS England's reply.
Both trusts were said to have received benefits from the system, according to a FoI response sent to campaign group Foxglove in June this year.
The Register asked both trusts and NHS England to explain the discrepancy.
One of the six trusts said to be logging into the cancer app, East Lancashire Hospitals, reported just one unique user. It later confirmed in an FoI response in August that it was not live with the FDP. It had planned to adopt the platform, leading with Cancer 360, but did not have a date for going live with the app.
No Palantir in the NHS also identified trusts that considered Cancer 360 but decided against adopting it.
East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust considered using the app but rejected it because there was "no immediate requirement for it," according to its FoI response.
In its FoI response, Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said it did not adopt the app because of issues around the metadata requirements.
Meanwhile, official figures on cancer diagnosis waiting times show wider improvements across England. Given Cancer 360's limited uptake, those national gains cannot simply be credited to the app.
In July this year, the UK's statistical regulator told NHS England to ensure ministers are briefed accurately following a row over data used to promote the purported benefits of the Palantir-run FDP.
Campaign group Foxglove had found that nearly a third of NHS trusts using Palantir's health data platform were performing fewer patient procedures than before it went live and that Chelsea and Westminster Hospital accounted for 84 percent of the reported fall in outpatient waiting lists, while only 16 trusts were using the FDP tool. The Office for Statistics Regulation began assessing NHS England's claims about the FDP's performance and the quango included more caveats on its website.
Scrutiny of the FDP's reported benefits comes as the government decides whether to continue the Palantir-led contract beyond February 2027. The initial contract was provided for a term of up to seven years, with a maximum value of 330 million.
Reports this week suggest the government is set to renew the contract, but run a parallel procurement to find an alternative to Palantir as pressure mounts to reduce lock-in to a single vendor and boost sovereign technology.
Palantir was founded with startup money from a CIA-linked VC firm and has relied on close ties with the US intelligence, military, and immigration services since its inception, although its recent growth in the wider business market is notable. (R)