Inside FDP is an exclusive series of articles written by the former deputy director of data engineering at NHS England, Tom Bartlett, who led the 150-person team that built the Federated Data Platform (FDP), the controversial Palantir-supplied system linking data across the health and care service. His insights into the challenges facing NHS data, and the solutions available to resolve them, make essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand what’s really happening with FDP in the NHS.
Since I left NHS England in March I have been speaking publicly about the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP). The response has been striking. Senior analysts, clinical leaders, healthtech founders and journalists keep asking variations of the same questions.
Why is the software platform from Palantir uniquely suited to this? What does FDP do that existing platforms cannot? Why can't the NHS – or a UK-based software company - just build one itself? Why aren't we using our existing investments? Is it really just an expensive data warehouse?
And underneath all of them, the question that matters most - what problem is FDP actually trying to solve?
The more I have these conversations, the more I realise that the answer has never been clearly stated in public.
The programme's own communications have described FDP in terms of connecting vital health information across the NHS, helping staff deliver better care for patients and work more efficiently.
Critics have focused on the supplier and its controversial reputation. Commentators have discussed the procurement.
Almost nobody has named the underlying problem that the platform was designed to address, or the architectural vision that some of the most senior data leaders in NHS England have been working toward but have rarely articulated publicly.
This series of articles is an attempt to fill that gap.
The argument rests on a concept I call a "frontline-first" approach to data. The idea is not new. Elements of it exist in pockets across the NHS and in the thinking of people who have been working on this for years. But as a named concept with a clear definition, it has not been part of the public discourse. I think it should be.
The series has five parts. This first post defines the problem. Part 2 defines the Frontline-First concept and what it looks like in practice, including how FDP delivers it. Part 3 describes the architectural choice that makes FDP structurally different - the ontology, object types, and actions. Part 4 explains why the Canonical Data Model is the most important asset in the programme. Part 5 addresses the objections I hear most often, including whether the NHS needs a single platform at all.
