Palantir Technologies Inc. invested a lot of time and energy in cultivating its relationship with Britain’s National Health Service — treating its chairman to $75 watermelon cocktails and working effectively for free during the pandemic. That effort paid off this week when the US software company won a seven-year contract to overhaul the NHS’s patient-data system. The deal’s success may hinge on how skillfully Palantir can handle another lobbying task: convincing the people who actually work in and use the health service to trust it.

That may be a formidable challenge. Palantir’s involvement in the NHS has been controversial since the start, with the British Medical Association, patient groups and civil rights activists questioning whether a company whose early backers included the US Central Intelligence Agency is an appropriate partner for a publicly funded health-care system. So there was a predictable backlash to Tuesday’s announcement from the health secretary, Victoria Atkins, that a group led by Palantir was awarded a £330 million ($414 million) contract to create a so-called federated data platform for NHS England.