NHS Give Google Patient Info

Google and NHS enter into data-sharing agreement to build an app that can alert doctors to patients who are at risk of kidney injuries.

16:38 05 May 2016

The NHS has given Google’s artificial intelligence programme access to an estimated 1.6 million patient files. According to New Scientist, Google’s DeepMind has entered into a data-sharing agreement with the NHS in a plan to build an app that can alert doctors to patients who are at risk of kidney injuries.

 

Google believes that the plan can improve safety but privacy campaigners raised some privacy concerns.

 

Phil Booth, coordinator of patient data protection group medConfidential, said: “There are existing and strong processes for doing safe medical research using data; but this project seems to have followed none of them.

 

“To ensure patient confidence, properly run projects require transparency on what is being done, and why. That is to protect patients from the confusion about what this data will be used for.

 

“Even now, we have no idea why Google needed so many sensitive details of every treatment for every patient in the hospital, covering over half a decade.”

 

Meanwhile, Google explained that the data will be encrypted and will not be used commercially.

 

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman said: “We are working with clinicians at the Royal Free to understand how technology can best help clinicians recognise patient deterioration - in this case AKI.

 

“We have, and will always, hold ourselves to the highest possible standards of patient data protection. This data will only ever be used for the purposes of improving healthcare and will never be linked with Google accounts or products.”