Google's Secret 'Project Nightingale' Gathers Personal Health Data on Millions of Americans--Update
November 11 2019 - 2:23PM
Dow Jones News
By Rob Copeland
Google is teaming with one of the country's largest health-care
systems on a secret project to collect and crunch the detailed
personal health information of millions of Americans across 21
states, according to people familiar with the matter and internal
documents.
The initiative, code-named "Project Nightingale," appears to be
the largest in a series of efforts by Silicon Valley giants to gain
access to personal health data and establish a toehold in the
massive health-care industry. Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and
Microsoft Corp. are also aggressively pushing into healthcare,
though they haven't yet struck deals of this scope.
Google launched the effort last year with St. Louis-based
Ascension, the country's second-largest health system.
The data involved in Project Nightingale pertains to lab
results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other
categories, and amounts to a complete health history, including
patient names and dates of birth.
Neither patients nor doctors have been notified. At least 150
Google employees already have access to much of the data on tens of
millions of patients, according to a person familiar with the
matter and documents.
Some Ascension employees have raised questions about the way the
data is being collected and shared, according to documents, but
privacy experts said it appeared to be permissible under federal
law. That law, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act of 1996, generally allows hospitals to share data with business
partners without telling patients, as long as the information is
used "only to help the covered entity carry out its health-care
functions."
Google in this case is using the data, in part, to design new
software, underpinned by advanced artificial intelligence and
machine learning, that zeros in on individual patients to suggest
changes to their care. Staffers across Alphabet Inc., Google's
parent, have access to the patient information, documents show,
including some employees of Google Brain, a research science
division credited with some of the company's biggest
breakthroughs.
A Google spokeswoman said the project is fully compliant with
federal health law and includes robust protections for patient
data. An Ascension spokesman had no immediate comment..
Write to Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 11, 2019 14:08 ET (19:08 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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