Slashdot Mirror
Google AI Has Access To 1.6M People's NHS Records (newscientist.com)
Hal Hodson, reporting for New Scientist:It's no secret that Google has broad ambitions in healthcare. But a document obtained by New Scientist reveals that the tech giant's collaboration with the UK's National Health Service goes far beyond what has been publicly announced. The document -- a data-sharing agreement between Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust -- gives the clearest picture yet of what the company is doing and what sensitive data it now has access to. The agreement gives DeepMind access to a wide range of healthcare data on the 1.6 million patients who pass through three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust -- Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free -- each year. This will include information about people who are HIV-positive, for instance, as well as details of drug overdoses and abortions. The agreement also includes access to patient data from the last five years. According to their original agreement, Google cannot use the data in any other part of its business.
Anonymized hospital and health care data are widely available to researchers inside the U.S. as well, and have been for a long time.
This is a non-story about longstanding practice.
Overlord.
Bow.
Now!
All I got were a bunch of Kardashian links.
That we start to replace expensive scarce error prone doctors with AI.
Neither the writeup nor TFA mention "anonymized". Could you explain, where you got the information from?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Google is building an automatic diagnostician. How interesting...
... replaced by nurses with iPads.
I see lots of unemployed GP doctors on the horizon...
Deepmind will be convinced all humans have bad teeth and funny walks!
Greetz from Yankeeland !! Hows that digital colonoscopy workin out for ya?
C|N>K
If you want results out of it it seems reasonable to put data in for analysis.
Also, I can imagine Deepmind taking better care of the data than the UK government does. I think the government has had a string of data breaches in the past.
Finally, presumably the company has deep pockets as well as a deep mind and can therefore be sued if they are negligent.
Nullius in verba
This is NOT anonymized data.
"It includes logs of day-to-day hospital activity, such as records of the location and status of patients – as well as who visits them and when."
Yes, I know. It's the UK, but you get the point.
HIPPA makes the distinction between data used for "healthcare operations" (improving care for the provider using the data) and "publishable research". The former can use identified data as needed. Research for publication requires oversight by institutional review boards and privacy officers, and, except in low risk situations, requires patient consent for use of identified data. I read the data sharing agreement for this study as Google doing the work for direct patient care "as a service for NHS Hospital Trusts. Assuming that the NHS has rules pretty similar to the U.S., this would, I think, mean that the results could be more widely shared (because "National" Health) than they would in the US. The same non-consented, identity-based research in the US could only be shared within the institution doing the research. Hence Google goes to Great Britain to get the big dataset. And very likely, by contract and by law, the lack of publication means that sick people in other countries won't get the benefits of the work. Privacy and health care research are hard to reconcile.
Not making this up. I designed and operated a research data warehouse for a hospital for 8 years.