Paging Dr. Google: How the Tech Giant Is Laying Claim to Health Data

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>Google pushed one medical-data manager not to share data with other companies, according to a person familiar with the pitch.

>As part of its huge offer for Cerner, whose software is embedded in doctors’ offices in 30 countries, Google used its size to its advantage. Google Cloud executives offered that other arms of the conglomerate would buy unspecified other services from Cerner, people familiar with the matter say.

>Cerner ultimately accepted a less generous offer from Amazon, in part because the company decided Amazon was more trustworthy on security, according to one of these people.

>Existing players in the health-care data market also fear that the tech giant will gain too much power in their industry. Some hospital and technology executives say they declined deals with Google lest it become a future competitor.

>“We could never pin down Google on what their true business model was,” says a Cerner executive involved in the discussions.

It seems like Google is using GCP as a venus fly trap and Cerner was right to avoid them. The lure is cheap bog standard cloud services, but only if you have a more all-encompassing partnership where your data helps them develop other Google products.

>Reiterating what Google has told lawmakers and industry executives in private meetings over the past two months, Dr. Feinberg says he operates on a personal directive from Mr. Schmidt: “Don’t worry about making money.”

This quote is extremely telling in my opinion, and it's just classic Google. The most generous interpretation of this is that Google has altruistic motivations to make advances in health and they shouldn't worry about how to monetize whatever they build. That of course is completely absurd and extremely dangerous because that is exactly how Google slides into evil (evil is banal). The less generous interpretation is that Dr. Feinberg is only there to provide a sheen of health industry credibility (key opinion leader) and he has no actual ownership of Google's health business at all.

And judging by this paragraph, I'm leaning to the latter:

>Outcry over the Ascension deal, including a federal inquiry and objections from patients, shocked executives inside Google, and opened fissures in its top ranks over how to proceed, according to people with knowledge of the discussions. The head of Google Health, Dr. Feinberg, pushed to tell the public more about his division’s operations, but met resistance from longtime staffers who cite the company’s tradition of keeping potential new products under wraps.

Well I don't know if even going with Amazon would be any better than going with Google since both of them will be prominent players in healthcare technology anytime soon. But it is more than clear that as Google obtains more health data via hospitals contracts, GCP customers, etc this helps their deep-learning systems learn more about you and despite releasing interesting papers about their achievements, they have closed up some of their methods which limits reproducible science and research.

Think very carefully about the sensitivity of this health data. Do we really want the likes of Google and Amazon analyzing this data for commercial purposes and later getting away with it? I neither trust that Amazon or Google will act in the best interests of whats good for healthcare, but I guess Cerner chose the lesser of two evils and went with a weaker devil.