Google’s ‘Project Nightingale’ Gathers Personal Health Data on Millions of Americans
Google’s ‘Project Nightingale’ Gathers Personal Health
Data on Millions of Americans
Search giant is amassing health records from Ascension facilities in 21
states; patients not yet informed
Google launched the effort last
year with Ascension, the country’s second-largest health system.
By Rob Copeland Updated Nov. 11, 2019 4:27 pm ET
Google is engaged with one of the
U.S.’s largest health-care systems on a project to collect and crunch the
detailed personal-health information of millions of people across 21 states.
The initiative, code-named “Project
Nightingale,” appears to be the biggest effort yet by a Silicon Valley giant to
gain a toehold in the health-care industry through the handling of patients’
medical data. 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 Project Nightingale in
secret last year with St. Louis-based Ascension, a Catholic chain of 2,600
hospitals, doctors’ offices and other facilities, with the data sharing
accelerating since summer, according to internal documents.
The data involved in the initiative
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.
Paging Nurse Google
The tech giant is
teaming with Ascension on an ambitious project to crunch patient data for
treatment and administrative purposes.to patient’s team.
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 the documents.
In a news release issued after The
Wall Street Journal reported on Project Nightingale on Monday, the companies
said the initiative is compliant with federal health law and includes robust
protections for patient data.
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, internal documents show,
including some employees of Google Brain, a research science division credited
with some of the company’s biggest breakthroughs.
Google Cloud President Tariq Shaukat
said the company’s goal for health care is centered on “ultimately improving
outcomes, reducing costs, and saving lives.”
Eduardo Conrado, an executive vice
president at Ascension, said: “As the health-care 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 health-care providers.”
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 Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has said repeatedly this
year that finding new areas of growth for cloud is a priority.
Ascension, the second-largest health
system in the U.S., 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 to have a
system that is faster than its existing decentralized electronic
record-keeping.
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
change 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 Journal reported that
Google opted not to disclose to users 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.
Regulators are now scrutinizing the
company on a number of fronts. Federal and state investigators over the summer
made public 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 said.
Google has said its products increase
consumer choice and that it is committed to cooperating with the inquiries.
This year, Mr. Pichai has touted new privacy protections for Google’s billions
of users.
The company made public this month a
$2.1 billion deal for wearable fitness maker Fitbit Inc., which makes watches
and bracelets that track health information like a person’s 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.
Google appears to be sharing
information within Project Nightingale more broadly than in its other forays
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.”
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