The UK's Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) has told NHS England it must ensure ministers and officials communicate more clearly and accurately about data used to promote the benefits of the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), a £330 million system built on technology from US firm Palantir. The intervention follows a row sparked by campaign group Foxglove, which used Freedom of Information requests to show that nearly a third of trusts using the platform were actually performing fewer patient procedures than before it was introduced, undermining headline claims of the platform's success.

Foxglove's analysis found that Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust alone accounted for 84% of a reported fall in outpatient waiting lists, despite only 16 trusts using the tool, while NHS England had claimed 139 trusts were using the FDP by June with 137 reporting benefits. A widely repeated figure, that a related Inpatient Care Coordination Solution had enabled 111,589 additional operating theatre procedures, was also questioned, since NHS England's own documentation warned against drawing cause-and-effect conclusions from the data. The OSR said NHS England had since added a caveat sentence to its published figures on 6 June and updated its methodology page, changes it welcomed but said many had seen as a significant shift in how the benefits were being presented.