San Francisco Chronicle

Google to study data on patients

- By Natasha Singer and Daisuke Wakabayash­i

In a sign of Google’s major ambitions in the health care industry, the search giant is working with the country’s secondlarg­est hospital system to store and analyze the data of millions of patients in an effort to improve medical services, the two organizati­ons announced this week.

The partnershi­p between Google and the medical system, Ascension, could have huge reach.

Ascension operates 150 hospitals in 20 states and the District of Columbia. Under the arrangemen­t, the data of all As

cension patients could eventually be uploaded to Google’s cloud computing platform.

It is legal for health systems to share patients’ medical informatio­n with business partners like electronic medical record companies. Even so, many patients may not trust Google, which has paid fines for violating privacy laws, with their personal medical details.

Google mentioned the arrangemen­t in an earnings call in July, but provided few details. More about the arrangemen­t was announced this week, after the Wall Street Journal published an article about it.

Already, the two organizati­ons are testing software that allows medical providers to search a patient’s electronic health record by specific data categories and create graphs of the informatio­n, like blood test results over time, according to internal documents obtained by the New York Times. The goal is to give medical profession­als better access to patient data, to improve patient care and, ultimately, to try to glean insights from the data to help treatment.

Google is teaming up with Ascension, a nonprofit, as American consumer tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft jockey to gain a bigger share of the huge health care market. Apple has expanded into virtual medical research using its iPhone and Apple Watch. Microsoft has introduced cloudbased tools to help health systems share medical data. Last year, Amazon joined JPMorgan Chase and Berkshire Hathaway in a venture to try to improve care and reduce costs for their employees in the United States.

Google’s health efforts include a push to use artificial intelligen­ce to read electronic health records and then try to predict or more quickly identify medical conditions.

The company’s efforts require machines to learn by analyzing health records collected by hospitals and other medical institutio­ns. Under the Ascension partnershi­p, dozens of Google employees may have access to patient data like name, birth date, race, illnesses and treatments, according to the internal documents. These include employees who work on Medical Brain, the company’s health AI team.

At least a few Ascension employees in the project have raised concerns that Google employees downloaded patient data, according to the internal documents.

They have also raised concerns about whether all the Google software involved in processing Ascension patient data complies with a federal privacy law. That law, the Health Insurance Portabilit­y and Accountabi­lity Act, or HIPAA, restricts how doctors, health systems and their business associatio­ns may handle identifiab­le patient data.

Ascension said the deal complies with the law. In a followup email, the health system said that its patient data is stored in a private space within Google’s cloud platform and that Google could not use it for any purpose other than providing tools for Ascension medical providers.

Tariq Shaukat, the president of Google Cloud, said in the statement that by working with groups like Ascension, “we hope to transform the delivery of health care.”

Ascension did not respond to questions about how many patient records had already been transferre­d to Google Cloud.

Google’s handling of health care data is a touchy subject. Through its advertisin­g business, Google already knows a vast amount about consumers — including what people are interested in, where they are located, and what they watch on YouTube or search for on Google.

When Google announced plans this month to acquire Fitbit, a maker of activity tracking devices, for $2.1 billion, the company said it would not use health data from the trackers in its advertisin­g business.

In 2017, a British government watchdog agency ruled that the Royal Free National Health Service Foundation Trust, a major health care provider, had violated a data protection law when it transferre­d medical records to DeepMind, an artificial intelligen­ce lab in London owned by Google’s parent company, without sufficient­ly informing patients.

DeepMind further outraged privacy groups in 2018 when it announced plans to transfer the unit that processed the medical records to Google.

DeepMind’s health team officially joined Google in September.

In June, Google, the University of Chicago Medical Center and the University of Chicago were sued in a potential classactio­n lawsuit accusing the hospital of sharing hundreds of thousands of patients’ records with the technology giant without properly stripping the records of identifiab­le date stamps or doctor’s notes.

In a research paper last year, the company said it had used electronic health record data of patients from 2009 to 2016. Patient data was removed but dates of service were maintained.

The lawsuit said the inclusion of dates was a violation of HIPAA, in part because Google could combine them with informatio­n it already had, like location data from smartphone­s, to establish the identity of the patients.

A Google spokesman said in a statement that it complied with the law, which allows medical institutio­ns to disclose patients’ personal health informatio­n for research purposes as long as the records have been stripped of identifyin­g details.

Google has filed to have the lawsuit dismissed. The University of Chicago and the medical center have denied the accusation­s.

 ?? Jeff Chiu / Associated Press ?? Google says it is working with Ascension to compile medical data that will identify patterns to help doctors, but some are concerned about privacy.
Jeff Chiu / Associated Press Google says it is working with Ascension to compile medical data that will identify patterns to help doctors, but some are concerned about privacy.

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