Shulou(Shulou.com)06/02 Report--

Google is using its search and artificial intelligence technology to analyze detailed health data about millions of Americans in Ascension through a partnership with the nation's second-largest health care system, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Missouri-based Ascension Health Center, founded in 1999, is one of the largest Catholic health systems in the world, with 150 hospitals across the country and care centers in 20 states and Washington, D.C.

Sources familiar with the project said patients were unaware Google had access to their data. At least 150 Google employees already have access to most of the data on tens of millions of patients in the United States.

This cooperation between the two sides is known as the "Nightingale Project." Since last year, Google has been collecting health data on millions of Americans across 21 different states, including data on lab results, diagnoses and hospital records, as well as patient names and dates of birth.

Following the Wall Street Journal report, Ascension issued a press release announcing the partnership. Ascension said the partnership involved moving its infrastructure to Google's cloud platform and the company's adoption of Google's G Suite productivity tools.

Tariq Shaukat, president of Google Cloud, said in a statement: "By partnering with leading healthcare systems like Ascension, we hope to transform the way healthcare is delivered through the power of cloud, data analytics, machine learning and modern productivity tools. "

Eduardo Conrado, executive vice president of strategy and innovation at Ascension, said: "As the healthcare environment continues to evolve rapidly, we must transform to better meet the needs and expectations of the people we serve, as well as our own caregivers and healthcare providers.

Document screenshot showing patient search tool

Regarding data privacy issues, Ascension further stated that this partnership complies with HIPAA regulations.

A health privacy expert told The Wall Street Journal that the program appears legal under HIPAA. Because the law "generally allows hospitals to share data with business partners without informing patients, as long as the information is" only used to help covered entities perform their healthcare functions."

The project, which began at least in February, includes transferring patient records to Google's Cloud Virtual Machine and a search product, Lei Feng said. The product enables Ascension healthcare providers to view an "overview page" about their patients-including complete patient information as well as notes on patient medical issues, test results, and medications and information from scanned documents.

Google is testing a new patient search tool.

Finally, Google's AI technology could also help Ascension answer questions such as: "What past history should you look back on? "What chance of intervention? "And" What are the risks to future outcomes? "

According to media analysts, Ascension's massive data-sharing project with Google has multiple goals. For its part, Google is developing new software that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to suggest treatments for individual patients. Google's ultimate goal is to develop a searchable, cloud-based tool to host and examine large amounts of patient data and then sell it to other healthcare systems.

Internal documents seen by The Wall Street Journal indicate that Ascension also hopes Google's data mining can help identify other ways to earn revenue from patients, such as ordering more medical exams.

Google isn't the only one, tech giants including Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce have been trying to get a piece of the multi-trillion dollar healthcare market. Earlier this month, Google said it bought wearable fitness device maker Fitbit for $2.1 billion, marking a deeper investment in medical services.

Improving the way caregivers use electronic health records has been a priority. Research shows doctors spend more time on documents than interacting with patients, so improving the way caregivers use electronic health records has become a priority. Google's cloud computing division now generates $8 billion in revenue annually, and it's further into healthcare, with customers including Mayo Clinic, McKesson and Kaiser Permanente.

But Google's path to healthcare isn't unimpeded either, with Google and its parent company Alphabet facing scrutiny over some of their past healthcare partnerships.

This summer, a patient at the University of Chicago sued Google and the university, saying they improperly shared patient data for research that used artificial intelligence to predict future medical events. Both Google and the University of Chicago deny any wrongdoing.

In 2016, Deepmind, Alphabet's AI arm, came under fire for obtaining patient records from the UK's National Health Service without proper patient consent. The company admitted its mistake and renewed the contract. Privacy advocates were even angrier last fall, however, when Deepmind Health announced plans to merge with Google, reversing the company's past promises to remain independent.

Google's plan to buy Fitbit for $2.1 billion has recently raised alarm among lawmakers, with Virginia Sen. Mark Warner saying the announcement "raises serious concerns" and calling for mandatory disclosure of how large tech companies use sensitive data in "medical products."

Stacy Tovino, a bioethics expert and law professor at the University of Nevada, said some of the privacy issues large tech companies face when dealing with medical records stem from the vast amounts of other data they store about people, including search and location histories. Even if the identification of patient records is removed under HIPAA rules, companies such as Google and Facebook still have the unique ability to use other mined data to determine patient identity.

Due to advances in big data analytics and machine learning,"de-identification has become almost impossible," says Torvino.

Google's search service is already deployed in at least one Ascension center in Florida and Texas, and Google plans to launch the product in Ascension centers in Michigan and Tennessee by the end of the year, according to the documents.

https://www.toutiao.com/i6758249776434643470/

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.