GOOGLE has been given the confidential records including full names and patient histories of an estimated 1.6 million NHS patients in a data-sharing agreement.
Under it, Google’s artificial intelligence division ‘DeepMind’ has access to all data of patients attending the Royal Free, Barnet and Chase Farm hospitals in London over the past five years and continuing until 2017.
Google claims it is using the data to develop an app known as Streams that will alert doctors when someone is at risk of developing acute kidney injury (AKI). The Royal Free Trust issued a statement, claiming: ‘Our arrangement with DeepMind is the standard NHS information-sharing agreement set out by NHS England’s corporate information governance department, and is the same as the other 1,500 agreements with third-party organisations that process NHS patient data.
‘As with all information sharing agreements with non-NHS organisations, patients can opt out of any data-sharing system by contacting the trust’s data protection officer.’
Dominic King, a senior scientist at Google DeepMind, said: ‘Access to timely and relevant clinical data is essential for doctors and nurses looking for signs of patient deterioration. This work focuses on acute kidney injuries that contribute to 40,000 deaths a year in the UK, many of which are preventable.
‘The kidney specialists who have led this work are confident that the alerts our system generates will transform outcomes for their patients. For us to generate these alerts it is necessary for us to look at a range of tests taken at different time intervals.’
However, Sam Smith, a co-ordinator of patient data campaign group MedConfidential, said: ‘The big question is why they want it. This a very rich data set. If you are someone who went to the A&E department, why is your data in this?’
Google has not ruled out using the data for other purposes and has big ambitions in private healthcare. In 2013 it launched Calico, a firm set up to look at ways to tackle ageing, while X, Google’s research arm, launched Baseline in 2014 – which plans to map genetic information to gain a picture of what makes humans healthy.
Daniel Nesbitt, research director of Big Brother Watch said: ‘With more and more information being shared about us it’s becoming clear that in many cases members of the public simply don’t know who has access to their information. All too often we see data being shared without the informed consent or proper understanding of those it will actually affect. It’s vital that patients are properly informed about any plans to share their personal information.’
In fact NHS patients are being privatised. An NHS England spokesman told News Line: ‘It’s the Royal Free London Hospital that has engaged in a partnership with Google DeepMind to develop an app. They have independence to commission their own services and they are responsible to Monitor.’
