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 since summer, the documents show.
The data involved in Project Nightingale encompasses 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.
In a press release issued after the Journal's article was
published, the companies said the project is compliant with federal
health law and includes robust protections for patient data.
Google Cloud president Tariq Shaukat said in the release that
the company's goal in health care centers on "ultimately improving
outcomes, reducing costs, and saving lives."
"As the healthcare environment continues to rapidly evolve, we
must transform to better meet the needs and expectations of those
we serve as well as our own caregivers and healthcare providers,"
said Eduardo Conrado, an executive vice president at Ascension.
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 identify additional tests that could be
necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more
revenue from patients, 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.
Regulatory attention has since arrived in force. Federal and
state investigators over the summer announced separate antitrust
inquiries into Google. The federal probe is examining whether
Google's existing trove of data amassed from its flagship search
engine, home speakers, free email service and numerous other arms
give the company an unfair advantage over competitors, people
familiar with the matter say.
Google has said its products increase consumer choice, and that
it is committed to cooperating with the inquiries. Mr. Pichai this
year has touted new privacy protections for Google's billions of
users.
The company last week announced a $2.1 billion deal for wearable
fitness maker Fitbit Inc., which makes watches and bracelets that
track health information like heart rate. Politicians of both
parties quickly criticized the deal; Rep. David Cicilline (D.,
R.I.), chairman of the House Antitrust Subcommittee, warned that
the Fitbit deal would give Google "deep insights into Americans'
most sensitive information."
The companies said they would be transparent about any Fitbit
data they collect.
Project Nightingale appears to be broader than other forays
Google has made into health-care data. In September, Google
announced a 10-year deal with the Mayo Clinic to store the hospital
system's genetic, medical and financial records. Mayo officials
said at the time that any data used to develop new software would
be stripped of any information that could identify individual
patients before it is shared with the tech giant.
Google was founded with the goal of organizing the world's
information, and health has been a fascination of its top
executives from the early days. Google Health, a fledgling effort
to digitize existing medical records, was shut down in 2011 after
three years of limited adoption. Alphabet has since poured millions
of dollars into its under-the-radar Calico and Verily divisions,
which aim to combat aging and manage disease, respectively.
Google co-founder Larry Page, in a 2014 interview, suggested
that patients worried about the privacy of their medical records
were too cautious. Mr. Page said: "We're not really thinking about
the tremendous good that can come from people sharing information
with the right people in the right ways."
Write to Rob Copeland at rob.copeland@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 11, 2019 15:35 ET (20:35 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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