The project, code-named “The Nightingale Program,” appears to be one of a series of major initiatives by Silicon Valley giant Google to secure personal health data and establish a foothold in the huge healthcare industry.
Editor’s note: This article is from Tencent Technology, reviewing the commitment.
In the past two years, the US Internet giant Google has followed Facebook with countless violations of privacy scandals, such as allowing third-party partners to manually read Gmail users’ letters. According to the latest news from foreign media, an authoritative media in the United States once again broke the news that in 21 states in the United States, Google cooperated with one of the largest healthcare system companies in the United States to secretly collect and process the detailed personal health of millions of Americans. Privacy information.
According to foreign media reports, the project, code-named “The Nightingale Program,” seems to be one of a series of major projects implemented by Silicon Valley giant Google to gain personal health data and establish a foothold in the huge healthcare industry.
At present, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft are also actively promoting healthcare-related businesses, but these companies have not yet reached a large-scale personal information collection collaboration similar to Google.
According to internal documents, Google secretly started the “nightingale plan” last year. Google’s partner for the program is Ascension, a non-profit company headquartered in St. Louis, the second-largest health care system service provider in the United States. The pace of sharing personal data between the two companies has accelerated since this summer.
The US personal medical data covered by the program includes laboratory results, physician diagnostic records, and hospital records, which are equivalent to a complete personal health history, including information such as patient name and date of birth.
The relevant patients and doctors were not notified during the collection of personal medical privacy information by the two companies. According to a person familiar with the matter, at least 150 Google employees have access to most of the data from tens of millions of patients in the United States.
According to people familiar with the project, some employees of Ascension have raised questions about the way data is collected and shared from a technical and ethical perspective. But privacy experts say that this sharing behavior seems to be permissible under federal law.
This law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, generally allows hospitals to share data with business partners without having to inform patients as long as the information “is only used to help underwriting entities perform their health care functions”
In this case, Google is using some of these personal health data to develop new software based on advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, focusing on individual patients and making recommendations for their care.
Internal documents show that employees of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, have access to patient personal health information, including some employees of the Google Brain business team. Google Brain is a scientific research department and its field is considered to be one of the company’s biggest technological breakthroughs.
After the news of US media reports collecting personal health and privacy information, the two companies said their practices are in line with US federal health laws, including strong protection requirements for patient data.
Tariq Shaukat, president of Google Cloud Computing, said in a statement that the company’s healthcare R&D goals are focused on “finally improving results, reducing costs and saving patients’ lives”
Ascension Executive Vice President Eduardo Conrad said: “As the healthcare environment continues to grow rapidly, we must make changes to better meet the people we serve and our own caregivers and The needs and expectations of healthcare providers.”
In this project, Google and non-profit Ascension have similar financial motives. To date, Google has assigned dozens of engineers to the Nightingale Program, but has not charged for this work because Google hopes to use the framework to sell similar products to other medical systems.
The file shows that Google’s ultimate goal is to create a comprehensive search tool that brings together disparate patient data and keeps it in the same place.
The project is being developed by Google’s cloud computing division, which is lagging behind rivals such as Amazon and Microsoft in cloud computing market share. Google CEO Sandel Pichay has repeatedly said this year that it is imperative to find new growth areas for the cloud computing business.
Ascension is a chain of non-profit companies consisting of 2,600 hospitals, doctors’ clinics and other facilities, partly to improve patient care. The documents show that the company also wants to mine data to determine if additional testing is necessary and other ways in which the system can generate more revenue from patients.
Ascension is also eager to have a patient information system that is more convenient than existing discrete electronic medical records.
Google, like many of its peers in Silicon Valley, is sometimes criticized for not doing enough to protect user privacy. Google’s online video company, YouTube, agreed in September to pay the government $170 million in fines and change its practices to address complaints about YouTube’s illegal collection of child data and sales of targeted advertising. However, while accepting the penalty, YouTube neither recognizes nor denies misconduct.
Last year, US media reported that Google chose not to disclose an important vulnerability to users, which revealed the birth date, contact information and hundreds of thousands of users on its now closed social networking site “Google+”.His personal privacy data, Google’s partial motivation, is that the incident may trigger regulatory scrutiny. After being exposed by the media, Google said that the decision not to notify users violated legal requirements.
The focus of US government regulators on Google has begun to turn into concrete actions.
The US federal and state prosecutors announced an independent antitrust investigation this summer. People familiar with the matter said the federal government is investigating whether Google’s personal data collected from flagship search engines, home smart speakers, free e-mail services and many other affiliates gives the company an unfair advantage over its competitors.
Google said that its many products have increased consumer choice and promised to cooperate with the survey. In addition, Google CEO Pichay has promoted new privacy protections for billions of users of the company this year.
The company announced a $2.1 billion deal last week to acquire wearable fitness equipment maker Fitbit, which produces smart watches and sports bracelets that track health information such as heart rate.
American bipartisans quickly criticized the acquisition. David Sicillin, chairman of the House of Representatives Antitrust Committee, warned that the acquisition allowed Google to “deep insight into the most sensitive information of Americans.”
Google and Fitbit said that any Fitbit data they collect will be transparent.
The Nightingale Program seems to be more extensive than Google’s past collections of other health care data.
In September, Google announced a 10-year agreement with Mayo, a leading US medical institution, to store genetic data, medical and financial records for hospital systems. Mayo executives said at the time that any data used to develop new software would be removed from any information that could be associated with a particular patient before being shared with the tech giant.
Google Inc. was founded to organize world information, and health has been an area that its top management has valued since its early days. Among them, “Google Health” used to be a project to digitize existing medical records, but after three years of limited promotion, the project was closed in 2011.
After that, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has invested millions of dollars in relatively low-key subsidiaries, Calico and Luminy, which are dedicated to researching aging and coping with disease.
Google co-founder Larry Page said in an interview in 2014 that patients who are concerned about the leaked medical record privacy are too cautious. Page said: “We didn’t really think that sharing medical records with the right people in the right way would bring huge benefits.” (Tencent Technology Review / Cheng Hao)