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CNET Tech Industry Google has access to medical data of 1.6M UK patients

Google has access to medical data of

1.6M UK patients
The data, held by AI subsidiary DeepMind, includes patient HIV status, recorded overdoses and
abortions.

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Tech Industry
April 29, 2016
1:00 PM PDT

by Katie Collins
@katiecollins

Google knows more

about some British
citizens than
previously thought.
A formerly
undisclosed datasharing agreement
between Google and
the UK's state-run
National Health
Service was revealed
in a document
published Friday by
New Scientist. Under
the agreement, vast
swaths of data
regarding 1.6 million
patients at London
hospitals are passed
to Google-owned
articial intelligence
company DeepMind
as part of a research
program.

DeepMind wants to help doctors

identify kidney problems earlier
using its Streams app.
DeepMind

The program focuses on designing a kidney analysis tool. Three London hospitals
provided DeepMind with information about patients that also included data on HIV
status, recorded overdoses and abortions. It also includes the results of some
pathology and radiology tests.
The data can't be used to identify individual patients but raises questions about the
privacy of medical and health records. The agreement between Google and the
three London hospitals, all run by the Royal Free NHS Trust, will likely stoke a wider
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debate on the safe handling of medical and health data as technology's role in
predicting and monitoring illness expands.
"The problem comes back to the details of process," Phil Booth, a coordinator at
health privacy organization medCondential, said in a statement. "It's possible to do
this well, safely and without public concern; it's also possible to be creepy."
The NHS said the data was handled condentially.
"No patient-identiable data is shared with DeepMind," a spokeswoman for the
Royal Free NHS Trust said. "The information is encrypted and only the Royal Free
London has the key to that encryption."
She said all NHS patients can write to their physicians to opt out of having their
data submitted to the Secondary User Service, which provides the historical data to
DeepMind.
Google acknowledged DeepMind's relationship with the NHS in February, when it
announced the AI company was building an app that would help medics monitor
patients with kidney disease.
DeepMind is creating an app called Streams, which reviews blood tests to identify
patients at risk of developing acute kidney injury.
DeepMind is only using kidney data in its program but
received other health information from the hospitals because
of the way the forms are structured.

Oakland (San Francisco area)

Morelia

The data can legally be shared with DeepMind in accordance

with strict governance rules that also apply to 1,500 other
third-party organizations that have access to NHS records.

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DeepMind is forbidden from sharing data with any other part

of Google and will be compelled to delete all data once the
agreement comes to an end in 2017.
Tags: Tech Industry, Sci-Tech, Articial intelligence, Privacy, Google

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