Google's Secret 'Project Nightingale' Gathers Personal Health Data on Millions of Americans--2nd Update
November 11 2019 - 2:48PM
Dow Jones News
By Rob Copeland
Google is engaged in a secret project with one of the country's
largest health-care systems 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 health care,
though they haven't yet struck deals of this scope.
Google began the effort last year with St. Louis-based
Ascension, the second-largest health system in the U.S., with the
data sharing accelerating over this summer and fall, the documents
show.
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, both from a technological and
ethical perspective, according to the people familiar with the
project, 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 zeroes 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.
Google and nonprofit Ascension have parallel financial motives.
Google has assigned dozens of engineers to Project Nightingale so
far, without charging for the work, because it hopes to use the
framework to sell similar products to other health systems. Its end
goal is to create an omnibus search tool to aggregate disparate
patient data and host it all in one place, documents show.
The project is being developed under Google's cloud division,
which trails rivals like Amazon and Microsoft in market share.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said repeatedly this year that finding
new areas of growth for cloud is a priority.
Ascension, a Catholic chain of 2,600 hospitals, doctors' offices
and other facilities, aims in part to improve patient care. It also
hopes to mine data to order up more tests or determine where it
might be able to make more money from an individual patient,
documents show. Ascension is also eager for a faster system than
its existing decentralized electronic record-keeping network.
Google, like many of its Silicon Valley peers, has at times
drawn criticism for not doing enough to protect user privacy. Its
YouTube unit agreed in September to pay $170 million in fines and
make changes to its practices in response to complaints that it
illegally collected data on children to sell ads. YouTube neither
admitted nor denied wrongdoing.
Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google hid a
flaw that exposed hundreds of thousands of birth dates, contact
information and other personal data of subscribers in its
now-defunct social-networking website Google Plus, in part because
of fears that the incident could trigger regulatory scrutiny.
Google said at the time it went beyond legal requirements in
determining not to inform users.
Write to Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 11, 2019 14:33 ET (19:33 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Historical Stock Chart
From Aug 2024 to Sep 2024
Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)
Historical Stock Chart
From Sep 2023 to Sep 2024