Google has been controversially granted access to confidential patient records by the NHS—the UK’s national health service.
According to a scoop from New Scientist magazine, the ad giant’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind inked a data-sharing deal with three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust.
Roughly 1.6 million patients at three hospitals—Barnet, Chase Farm, and the Royal Free—will have their data analysed by Google’s AI system each year under the agreement (PDF), which was signed in September 2015.
Among other things, an unknown number of DeepMind and Google UK staff will have access to the data. According to the document, those employees “have undergone information governance training and signed a confidentiality agreement as part of their employment contract.”
Sensitive data includes NHS patients’ full names and medical histories revealing details such as HIV diagnoses, drug overdoses, and abortions. The information has been lifted from patient records from the last five years. However, there are a number of safeguards in place, including one which requires Google to stop sharing the data beyond the project’s shelf life—it currently has an expiry date of September 2017.
In February, Google attempted to make its DeepMind plans for the NHS more palatable by showing off a preview of its tech to a number of publications, with the claim that patient data would be ring-fenced from the multinational’s myriad of ad-stuffed services.
