Concerns raised over Google access to 1.6 million NHS patient files

By The Press Association3rd May 2016News EnglandData, Hospitals, London, News England, NHS

A Google artificial intelligence programme has been given access to an estimated 1.6 million NHS patient files, it has been claimed.

According to New Scientist, the technology giant’s artificial intelligence division DeepMind has a data-sharing agreement in place with the NHS as part of a plan to build an app that can alert doctors to patients who are at risk from kidney injuries.

This has been met with concern by some privacy campaigners, but Google has defended the plan, saying it can help improve patient safety.

The agreement gives DeepMind access to data from all patients who pass through the Royal Free, Barnet and Chase Farm hospitals in London each year until 2017, also including the past five years, when Google will then be obliged to delete the data.

Phil Booth, coordinator of patient data protection group medConfidential, said: “There are existing and strong processes for doing safe medical research using data; but this project seems to have followed none of them.

“To ensure patient confidence, properly run projects require transparency on what is being done, and why. That is to protect patients from the confusion about what this data will be used for.

“Even now, we have no idea why Google needed so many sensitive details of every treatment for every patient in the hospital, covering over half a decade.”

However, Google responded by explaining that the data collected is encrypted, will not be used commercially and Google staff will be unable to personally identify patients as well as bring kept separate to other Google data.

The technology giant added that it follows the same information governance rules as 1,500 third-party organisations who also have certification to process patient data.

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman said: “We are working with clinicians at the Royal Free to understand how technology can best help clinicians recognise patient deterioration – in this case AKI.

“We have, and will always, hold ourselves to the highest possible standards of patient data protection. This data will only ever be used for the purposes of improving healthcare and will never be linked with Google accounts or products.”

DeepMind added that given the potentially broad range of patients who can suffer from AKI, narrowing the data field would be difficult.

In a statement, the Royal Free NHS Trust also said it “provides DeepMind with NHS patient data in accordance with strict information governance rules and for the purpose of direct clinical care only”.

DeepMind has said it plans to use the data it gathers to create an app called Streams which is solely for the use of healthcare professionals and can identify patients who are at risk from acute kidney injuries (AKI) and will then alert doctors when it identifies someone at risk.

The NHS says AKI is a contributing factor in around 20% of emergency hospital admissions, about a quarter of which are preventable.