Google probably has your confidential medical information
Thursday, November 21, 2019 5:18 PM
Under secretive "Project Nightingale” Ascension Health just gave patient data on millions of patients to Google. Big corporations should have no right to your information.
Google admits employees have access to the data. Keep in mind that Google makes money on advertising, that’s their customer. If you buy google devices or use their search engine, you are not the customer, you are data for their real customer: Advertisers.
It’s a very concerning trend, and it’s even supported by HIPAA laws, partly written by and influenced by large corporations.
Worse, people treated in Ascension hospitals and clinics were not even made aware their information was given to Google. And it is with full identifying information, names, numbers, diagnosis, everything.
If you think you are not impacted, think again. If you’ve been to any St. Thomas hospital or St. Thomas related clinic then you’re data is out there at Google. This was a tremendous shock to us as we had participated with St. Thomas / Ascension ACO in the past. We also refer many people to the excellent specialists that work within the St. Thomas system.
I only post this to point out an alarming trend with larger corporations influence on healthcare. Large data mining can absolutely help with patterns of care, and possibly find algorithms for more cost effective care, For example, researchers have developed Artificial Ingelligence that can read your EKG and predict if you’ll be alive in a year with 85% accuracy. They did this by feeding a lot of EKGs into the computer AI (1.77 million EKGs of 400,000 people). It accurately predicted death even in people with normal EKGs, which means a cardiologist looking at the EKG could find nothing wrong. Even more scary, no one knows how it works, or what it is seeing to make the determination. No one has any idea what to do to help. Imagine the impact AI data will have on your insurance rates if it thinks it knows how long you’ll live. AI cannot replace the trust and relationship you should have with your doctor, whether family practice or internal medicine or any specialty regarding your personal care and decisions. I’m not data, I’m a person, and individual people should have rights when it comes to healthcare schemes such as these. That’s why I prefer smaller clinics, local pharmacies, smaller stores, and avoid corporate clinics and recommend against telehealth such as teledoc and the rest. Your personal doctors are on call 24/7 to help you, use them.
We’ll endeavor to avoid these pitfalls as much as possible and we always thank you for your support.
Links to articles below:
https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/ascension-google-working-secret-patient-data-project-says-wsj
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/11/19/20971337/google-medical-records-ascension-reset-podcast