Last week Google acknowledged a link-up with the nation’s second-largest medical system, the nonprofit Ascension chain with hospitals in 20 states. The two entities are sharing the personal records of millions of patients in a deep-diving partnership first reported by the Wall Street Journal. That means names, birth dates, lab results, drug prescriptions, diagnoses charts, and billing history, all of it handed over without notifying doctors or patients.
It’s a business development, data crunching experiment and a bold step aimed at improving health care with focused technology. But it’s also alarming: Neither firm saw fit to announce the project that puts nearly 200 Google employees in touch with the head-to-toe patient profiles.
The designers of the program, dubbed Project Nightingale, say their work meets federal privacy guidelines that govern the sharing of electronic health records.
That claim is already drawing questions from federal regulators and health care watchdogs who think the undertaking may sail beyond the rules enacted over two decades ago as patient records migrated from manila folders to online databases. Some privacy experts believe that Nightingale, at least for now, meets the letter of the law. The federal Department of Health and Human Services isn’t quite as confident, and has called on Ascension and Google to supply more information on “the mass collection of individuals’ medical records.”
Google is selling the undertaking as a way to bring artificial intelligence, machine learning and cloud computing to bear on improving health care. Updating complex information systems could help doctors spot brewing trouble in their patients and recommend treatment. With its vast resources and deep bench of talent, Google is a natural for the job.
That’s a high-minded goal that anyone looking for medical help would want. Where, after all, has technology been while health care turned into a political football, costs shot up and patient satisfaction sank? If the tech world can create Netflix, Uber and Airbnb, it should be able to cook up a streamlined and accurate way to dispense medicine.
But what’s missing is truth. Ascension patients aren’t online guinea pigs. They deserve to know how their medical details are crunched and analyzed, especially by Google, whose fortunes rest on the trove of personal data reaped from search users.
Tracking shopping or dining habits is one thing, but health data is much more. Protecting the most intimate personal information has to be a priority, not a problem brushed aside in the hunt for efficiency. The shielded design of the Nightingale project indicates that both the hospital system and Google knew how worrisome the topic of health care privacy can be and kept silent.
Convincing the public of its sincerity is Google’s burden to bear, and its record on privacy is mixed.
Google-owned YouTube paid a $170 million fine for sifting customer data to send ads directly to children watching videos. When it bought Fitbit recently, it swung the other way, promising not to use the health data collected by the wristband tracker to zap users with ads.
There’s no denying that the enormous health care world that drains the economy and stymies lawmakers needs a shakeup.
That’s why other tech giants such as Amazon, with its online pharmacy, and Microsoft are brewing solutions. The Apple Watch, with its fitness features, isn’t just about telling time. Insurer Berkshire Hathaway and banking leader JPMorgan Chase are also in the game. Google isn’t any different, jumping into the field as the competition heats up.
Still, health data is different than directing shoe offers or movie tickets to an online customer. Dumping medical data into Google’s cyberlap, with no warning about possible abuses or shortcomings, needs a better explanation and a dose of oversight. Those assurances are missing.
©2019 the San Francisco Chronicle. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
