Google Challenged For Collecting American Health Data

The US Department of Health and Human Services is launching an inquiry into Google's partnership with giant US healthcare organisation named Ascension. The healthcare deal is a major win for Google's cloud business, Google Cloud, but it has immediately raised concerns over the level of access Google will have to patient data. 

Google and the Ascension health system have been secretly working together on a project to store and analyse millions of patient medical records. Ascension is transferring the personal and medical information of 50 million

Ascension patients onto Google's cloud network. Ascension is a faith-based healthcare provider and operates 2,600 healthcare centers, including 150 hospitals and 50 aged care centers, across 20 states and DC.

Both Google and Ascension claim they are fully compliant with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the US federal law governing the security and privacy of certain medical information. Hipaa allows hospitals to share data with business partners, without gaining the consent of patients or doctors, if it's for the purpose of improving healthcare services.

The healthcare data on tens of millions of patients can reportedly be accessed by 150 Google employees under what the two organisations call Project Nightingale.  

News of the deal has caught the attention of Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Civil Rights and it has said it will launch an investigation that "will seek to learn more information about this mass collection of individuals' medical records to ensure that Hipaa protections were fully implemented".  

Google says Project Nightingale is nothing more than a codename that Ascension and Google are using for the project. The code name is probably a nod to Florence Nightingale, a 19th century equivalent of today's data scientist who pioneered statistical methods during the Crimean War of the 1850s to improve hygiene and healthcare at hospitals. Google also says the deal is not a secret and that Google CEO Sundar Pichai flagged its partnership with Ascension in in July.

Pichai was informing investors about Google Cloud wins using artificial intelligence and machine learning to tackle the healthcare sector, which AWS and Microsoft are also targeting with cloud-based AI products.  

"Google Cloud's AI and ML solutions are helping healthcare organisations like Ascension improve the healthcare experience and outcomes," Pichai, said.  

Google contends that the partnership with Ascension is compliant with HIPPA rules claiming that the data is "logically siloed", meaning it is not kept on physically separate servers but "housed within a virtual private space and encrypted with dedicated keys". 

Google emphasises that the data is not used to sell ads. "Patient data remains in that secure environment and is not used for any other purpose than servicing the product on behalf of Ascension. Specifically, any Ascension data under this agreement will not be used to sell ads."

It's also keeping logs of anyone who accesses Ascension data and says the systems Google Cloud is using for the Ascension partnership are subject to external audits for compliance with ISO 27001 certification.  According to Google, Ascension approved Google employees to handle health data is because the data is "very complex and non-standardised", which means "we need to configure and tune our processing systems to ensure correct product operations and patient safety".

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