The NHS Is Showing Real Results
But...is it because of Palantir?
Welcome back to DailyPalantir! Today we’ve got to discuss updates with the NHS, a new healthcare partnership, and Palantir’s latest short interest. Let’s get into it!
NHS Best Month Results Post Pandemic Is In
From the latest NHS report:
Monthly performance data shows that the overall waiting list fell by more than 95,000 – down to 7.6 million in November from 7.7 million in October
Thanks to the measures set out in the NHS elective recovery blueprint, there were 60,000 fewer patients waiting for care in November (6.39 million) than in October (6.44 million) and 112,000 fewer than in September (6.5 million).
The progress was down to NHS staff delivering more than 1.63 million treatments in November, the highest monthly activity on record and around 150,000 more than the same month before the pandemic (1.48 million in Nov 2019).
The number waiting over a year for treatment fell to 355,412 in November, the lowest it has been since May 2022, with 65 week waits now down 59% from a peak of 233,051 in June 2021 to 94,563.
Not only was it a record month for treatment, but NHS staff also delivered a record number of diagnostics in November with more than 2.3 million patients receiving vital tests or checks for worrying symptoms – up 15% on the same month pre-pandemic with two million seen in November 2019.
More than 200,000 people received the all-clear or a definitive diagnosis for cancer in November within four weeks – also the highest since the new faster diagnosis target was recorded.
So, this was a very, very good month for the NHS. Now, the question is…is it because of Palantir?
Obviously not fully. Palantir just signed a deal 2 months ago and is likely going to take until Mid-2024 until everything is up and ready. Accenture, the consulting firm they partnered with, will help them in this process.
However, I do think it is safe to say that the NHS is getting these results in part because of Palantir.
Why? The NHS didn’t just give Palantir this deal randomly. They’ve been testing pilot versions on real hospitals since March 2022. What is likely, in my opinion, is that many of those hospitals have had access to some version of the Federated Data Platform (even if not fully) and because of the results they saw from those early versions (shown below), they got access to more features and were able to contribute to results as the entire platform was officially confirmed and given to Palantir.
From FT in March of 2022:
The US company’s data processing technology will be spread across 30 hospital trusts — bodies that organise healthcare in regions across the country — in March in a bid to help cut NHS waiting lists that have spiralled higher during the coronavirus pandemic. The rollout comes after a recent pilot of Palantir’s Foundry system at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Trust helped reduce the inpatient waiting list by 28 per cent — the equivalent of tens of thousands of patients — for all non-emergency surgeries, including for cancer treatments.
So, all of the results are not because of Palantir, but their software has been rolled out for almost 2 years now and shown actual reductions in wait times and backlogs. Remember, the NHS gave them those smaller deals in 2022 to reduce the dramatic increases back to pre-pandemic levels to handle the surge in patients. The press release we just got from the NHS indicated that many of their key metrics were finally hitting pre-pandemic levels, something Palantir was able to do in various hospitals across the UK back in 2022.
What matters now is if we can get more results like this every month. At the end of the day, numbers simply don’t lie. If progress is being made and UK citizens themselves see the difference, Palantir will get the credit, and that will open up more opportunities for them to help many other socialized systems across the world.
New Healthcare Partnership
Palantir Partners with University of ColoradoAnschutz Medical Campus to Establish the All of Us Research Program’s Center for Linkage and Acquisition of Data (CLAD)
Folks, we got a new healthcare partnership. This is the second one so far in Janurary. We began working on this deal in 2020 and given the progress went well, the NIH granted an extenstion.
The NIH (National Institute of Health) has been working with Palantir for a while now — they consistently fund research across the countries in universities and hospitals to help fund break throughs in medical research. Palantir’s software is going to be the data analytics layer for the CLAD platform, organizing a variety of survey and patient data.
From the PR:
As part of this effort, Palantir’s software will serve as the interoperable, digital backbone of the CLAD platform, securely connecting these new types of information to All of Us participant data to provide researchers more information to better understand the factors that influence health. Palantir’s software is able to securely ingest, harmonize, evaluate, and assess the quality of the new data sources, while also providing best-in-class governance and security controls to ensure data protection and privacy.
“We originally began our partnership with the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus at the NIH in May of 2020 through our work as the secure data enclave for the National Covid Cohort Collaborative (N3C) program. Recognizing that critical health outcomes require close collaboration across the health care ecosystem, we're honored to partner with peers across government, industry, and academia to support the All of Us Research Program,” said Hirsh Jain, Head of Public Health, Federal, Palantir. “This program has the potential to dramatically improve health outcomes and we are excited to be a part of the team.”
The grant is worth about $30M, Palantir won’t be getting all of it, but it’s nice to see them land another deal:
Healthcare seems like it’s going to be a huge vertical and potentially the one that scales massively throughout 2024.
Palantir Short Float Down
Short interest for end of December - as of 12/29/23:
Shares Sold Short 101.39 M
Change from Last (-) 6.61%
Percent of Float 5.55%
Palantir now down from 5.95% short to 5.55%, 101M out of 2.1B shares sold short
The shorts are continuing to cover. In September 2023, the float was about 8% short, so it’s declined meaningfully since then.
Why?
In my opinion, no one really knows what Palantir has planned for Q4 earnings. Maybe they tank the bed on guidance, maybe the surprise with 25% guided YoY growth. It’s just so risky to bet that a tech stock like Palantir will mess up massively to allow a short to be profitable, so I imagine many shorts are scared that the $16-$17 range can easily turn to $19-$20 and then capitulate there as macro conditions get better.
If Palantir guides for better revenue growth, shows stronger customer count, and improves net dollar retention — the street may continue giving the premium. The shorts would get burned.
If Palantir guides for low growth, doesn’t grow customers, average revenue per top 20 client falls, etc. then the street may give it a haircut. The question becomes how low is the street willing to take it, and given the immense amount of liquidity that exists around the stock, the dip buyers (like myself) will be waiting below $15, so it’s a real hard situation for shorts to be aggressive on, which is why we are seeing the short float decline.
That’s it for today — thank you for reading and I’ll see you tomorrow in your inbox!