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Google Enters the Fragile Arena of Capturing Massive Health Data
November 17, 2019
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Two weeks ago, we suggested that if Google sold a smart watch it could raise serious questions on the security of health data captured by the watch.  Well – no worries! The WSJ broke the news -- Google has quietly (or secretly) been working with Ascension, the largest nonprofit health system in the US, a Catholic chain of 2,600 hospitals, doctors' offices and more to capture millions of people’s health data in the US, without their knowledge, under a project called “Nightingale”

• Google is, primarily, an advertising business. 
• Amassing data from 21 states without informing patients or doctors sounds bad.
• The fact that both Ascension and Google quickly released announcements about how “proud” they are to do this work is difficult to understand, given it was only mentioned briefly in July.
• Trust in big tech is at a low.

 
Government regulation around patient data is actually pretty good under HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. 

• The reporting indicates that Google Cloud is providing a vendor service to Ascension for moving patient data to the cloud, and working on a search product that allows Ascension doctors, nurses, and healthcare providers to quickly find and help patients.
• It’s more encroachment into yet another industry, but healthcare software and systems need to improve the doctor’s efficiency to reduce the time on documentation than interacting with patients.
• De-identified third-party patient data is commonly shared and analyzed with third-parties to provide a better understanding of patient needs, how to provide better care, but this data has user IDs
• Google says, specifically: “To be clear: under this arrangement, Ascension’s data cannot be used for any other purpose than for providing these services we’re offering under the agreement, and patient data cannot and will not be combined with any Google consumer data.”
• A revolution in healthcare would be a good thing. The problem is that installing a for-profit, occasionally troubled, entity like Google at the helm isn’t exactly desirable.

Stacey Tovino, a bioethics expert and law professor at the University of Nevada, noted:

• “De-identification is getting to the point where it’s almost a myth" because of advances in big data analytics and machine learning.
• The obvious connection and privacy concerns between large tech companies handling medical records, while they also “store vast amounts of data about search and location history for people.”
• Oh, and Google is doing the work for free for the nonprofit Ascension, with the WSJ noting that Google hopes to build the infrastructure to sell this to other healthcare providers.

The implications being that anything free actually makes consumers and their data the product. Ultimately, no matter how valid the work may be, Google is far from creating and building trust in the community.
 
Google in a blog post, confirmed the federal inquiry into its deal with Ascension.