Hospitals Give Tech Giants Access to Detailed Medical Records

LewisBraham

Pretty outrageous that they're doing this: https://wsj.com/articles/hospitals-give-tech-giants-access-to-detailed-medical-records-11579516200

Microsoft and Providence, a Renton, Wash., hospital system with data for about 20 million patient visits a year, are developing cancer algorithms by using doctor’s notes in patient medical records. The notes haven’t been stripped of personally identifiable information, according to Providence.

And an agreement between IBM and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, to jointly develop artificial intelligence allows the hospital to share personally identifiable data for specific requests, people involved in the agreement said—though so far the hospital hasn’t done so and has no current plans to do so, according to hospital and IBM officials.

Mark

Indeed, especially since law enforcement has no right to that access without patient approval as far as I know. I see lawsuits ahead.

kings53man

I don't think the companies got the data identifying patients - just anonymous for statistical analysis.

LewisBraham

@kings53man From the way the article is written it seems the opposite is the case--these companies can have data identifying specific patients:

The notes haven’t been stripped of personally identifiable information, according to Providence....allows the hospital to share personally identifiable data for specific requests,

msf

Ascension, a Catholic chain with 150 hospitals across 20 states and the District of Columbia, is testing whether Google’s technology can accurately search and retrieve all information for a single patient—a widely known challenge that frustrates doctors and patients.

“By definition this means that the ’minimum’ necessary dataset for the creation of this capability is the entire longitudinal health-care record” for each patient, said Eduardo Conrado, Ascension’s chief strategy and innovations officer.

Anonymous perhaps. But more than statistical data. Complete records grouped by patient, albeit unidentified patients.

Imagine if the IRS published that sort of information about taxpayers. No name, no SSN, but lots of detail about income sources, taxes paid, etc. Certainly you'd be able to identify the records of Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos without their names. This is why the IRS doesn't provide, even aggregated, tax information about the very top tax payers.

Likewise, it's not sufficient to strip names from medical records to preserve privacy.

Gary1952

msf said:

Ascension, a Catholic chain with 150 hospitals across 20 states and the District of Columbia, is testing whether Google’s technology can accurately search and retrieve all information for a single patient—a widely known challenge that frustrates doctors and patients.

“By definition this means that the ’minimum’ necessary dataset for the creation of this capability is the entire longitudinal health-care record” for each patient, said Eduardo Conrado, Ascension’s chief strategy and innovations officer.

Anonymous perhaps. But more than statistical data. Complete records grouped by patient, albeit unidentified patients.

Imagine if the IRS published that sort of information about taxpayers. No name, no SSN, but lots of detail about income sources, taxes paid, etc. Certainly you'd be able to identify the records of Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos without their names. This is why the IRS doesn't provide, even aggregated, tax information about the very top tax payers.

Likewise, it's not sufficient to strip names from medical records to preserve privacy.

We all know how that turns out by a "mistake"

johnN

you can find lots about yourself on google/hospital records, sometimes google knows about you more than yourself or your spouse...thanks to tech boom