Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir are working with the UK’s National Health Service to use data to predict where health care shortages may arise. The state of health care must become transparent via dashboards.

The three U.S. companies plan to deploy data from the NHS 111 emergency number under the plan, along with other data related to Covid-19 that the government organization can provide. London-based Faculty AI also helps to interpret the data.

This includes information about which respirators are used in which places, the degree of illness among healthcare personnel, how many patients occupy which type of hospital beds and the expected duration of occupancy of beds.

On the basis of all this data, models and dashboards must be set up that map out the consequences of shifting resources such as respirators. Those analyzes should lead to better decisions on how to fight the coronavirus in the UK, such as deploying proactive equipment in regions, distributing patients to hospitals and identifying potential outbreaks at an early stage.

The BBC writes that there are privacy risks, but that the NHS promises that data will be anonymized and destroyed once the crisis is over. Amazon deploys its AWS cloud division, Microsoft’s participation involves Azure, and Palantir provides its Foundry software to tie together the data sources. The American Immigration and Customs Enforcement, among others, uses Palantir software to track down and deport people who have been illegally crossed.