Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain
1–10 of 57 posts
Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain
#2If I'm reading the article correctly, this is allowed by HIPAA already and is already happening (for research purposes and by third party healthcare companies?).
I would much rather google handle this data rather than unknown third parties with their own agendas, at least with google, the data comes with privacy risks that are relatively well known and might actually be useful for clinicians due to google's expertise on AI/pattern classification work which is primarily what medical diagnoses is about now (IANAD so perhaps this is incorrect).
Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain
#3For the unaware - this particular hospital chain (HCA) is super, super shady.
It's a for-profit institution, which is alarming in and of itself when the bar for hospitals to be nonprofit is so low (and when most of the "non-profit" hospitals are essentially for profit institutions anyway.)
Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain
#4If I'm reading the article correctly, this is allowed by HIPAA already and is already happening (for research purposes and by third party healthcare companies?). I would much rather google handle this data rather than unknown third parties with their own agendas, at least with google, the data comes with privacy risks that are relatively well known and might actually be useful for clinicians due to google's expertise…
oh boy you're gonna be downvoted here...
Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain
#5If I'm reading the article correctly, this is allowed by HIPAA already and is already happening (for research purposes and by third party healthcare companies?). I would much rather google handle this data rather than unknown third parties with their own agendas, at least with google, the data comes with privacy risks that are relatively well known and might actually be useful for clinicians due to google's expertise…
HIPAA lets companies share data with other companies as long as it meets two requirements-
1. The company that collects the data (the covered entity) has to have a Business Associate Agreement in place with the company they're sharing it with. This basically affirms that the other company is aware of their HIPAA requirements and intends to follow them.
2. The Business Associate needs to access the data to do the job they were hired for, which in turn should be related to patient care.
There are definitely a lot of companies out there doing this already, but I will say that the people with the data are not exactly giving it up easily. HIPAA makes it so that in the event of a breach the Covered Entity is responsible for beach notification to the patients. That means there's a huge incentive for hospitals, radiology groups, and anyone else who collects this data to make sure that the people they share it with have the proper safeguards in place. There are a ton of hoops to jump through, normally including independent third party audits. I've seen a few medical AI companies fail simply because they didn't have the security and no one trusted them with data.
Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain
#6I work as a data engineer in an academic medical research institution.
Most electronic medical records (EMR) systems are really about billing. Yes, there are clinically relevant data fields available but a large amount of what we were after as researchers was only available in free-text. Data abstraction is still mostly a human-expert driven activity. It would be fun if that could be better automated but there is significant ambiguity in clinical notes and pathology reports.
And don't get me started on data-ownership "turf wars." We often got significant pushback and simple refusal to have regular data feeds of IRB-approved data fields for collection with patients who were consented to studies.
Nothing was more annoying to me to get shot-down when trying to get data from our hospital EMR (again, data that was specifically approved for research use by IRB for patients already consented to studies) only to hear later about private enterprise "partnerships" that had full and unlimited access to all EMR data . . .
Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain
#7If I'm reading the article correctly, this is allowed by HIPAA already and is already happening (for research purposes and by third party healthcare companies?). I would much rather google handle this data rather than unknown third parties with their own agendas, at least with google, the data comes with privacy risks that are relatively well known and might actually be useful for clinicians due to google's expertise…
HIPAA lets companies share data with other companies as long as it meets two requirements- 1. The company that collects the data (the covered entity) has to have a Business Associate Agreement in place with the company they're sharing it with. This basically affirms that the other company is aware of their HIPAA requirements and intends to follow them. 2. The Business Associate needs to access the data to do the job…
That's true if the data is PHI, which means that it's personally identifiable. Per TFA, Google is using anonymized data. There are a bunch of companies that do this already, for example my last startup had anonymized health records from ~240 million Americans.
Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain
#8If I'm reading the article correctly, this is allowed by HIPAA already and is already happening (for research purposes and by third party healthcare companies?). I would much rather google handle this data rather than unknown third parties with their own agendas, at least with google, the data comes with privacy risks that are relatively well known and might actually be useful for clinicians due to google's expertise…
HIPAA lets companies share data with other companies as long as it meets two requirements- 1. The company that collects the data (the covered entity) has to have a Business Associate Agreement in place with the company they're sharing it with. This basically affirms that the other company is aware of their HIPAA requirements and intends to follow them. 2. The Business Associate needs to access the data to do the job…
Even though this happens... Google still makes me nervous because...
- Other large companies with other big agendas have violated rules on data sharing to improve performance in other areas. Amazon comes to mind with how they used markeplace data on vendors to produce their own competitive products. Rules are regularly broken.
- Will Google let auditors really have enough insight to make sure data is kept in a controlled manner? Google is so secretive.
If a data broker started a secure file sharing service I wouldn't trust them. That's how I feel about this.
Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain
#9"Don't be evil."
For-profit healthcare is evil.
Re: Google to use patient data to develop healthcare algorithms for hospital chain
#10I work as a data engineer in an academic medical research institution. Most electronic medical records (EMR) systems are really about billing. Yes, there are clinically relevant data fields available but a large amount of what we were after as researchers was only available in free-text. Data abstraction is still mostly a human-expert driven activity. It would be fun if that could be better automated but there is sig…
This is extremely spot on, Cerner goes to far as to tie almost everything to a billing encounter (FIN). Yet the documents still come over as PDFs that clinicians have to parse through.