Google has Access to Detailed Health Records on Tens of Millions of Americans
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Google has access to detailed health records on tens of millions of Americans
Google quietly partnered last year with Ascension-the country's second-largest health system-and has since gained access to detailed medical records on tens of millions of Americans, according to a November 11 report by The Wall Street Journal.
The endeavor, code-named "Project Nightingale," has enabled at least 150 Google employees to see patient health information, which includes diagnoses, laboratory test results, hospitalization records, and other data, according to internal documents and the newspaper's sources. In all, the data amounts to complete medical records, WSJ notes, and contains patient names and birth dates.
The move is the latest by Google to get a grip on the sprawling health industry. At the start of the month, Google announced a deal to buy Fitbit, prompting concerns over what it will do with all the sensitive health data amassed from the popular wearables. Today's news will likely spur more concern over health privacy issues.
Neither Google nor Ascension has notified patients or doctors about the data sharing. Ascension-a Catholic, non-profit health system-includes 34,000 providers who see patients at more than 2,600 hospitals, doctor offices, and other facilities across 21 states and the District of Columbia.
[...] Both Google and Ascension said that the project is compliant with federal health information privacy protections and is "underpinned by a robust data security and protection effort."
Health privacy experts told WSJ that the project appears to be legal under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). As the newspaper notes, the law "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.'"
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