Earlier quoted context omitted.
One reading of this is that it's a cross-departmental collaboration, rather than just a single division.
That's the difference everyone here is talking about though. Normally in the healthcare industry, you engage a cloud provider, and it's "you store this data for us." Full Stop. You don't look at it. You don't analyze it. You don't share it. You don't touch it. It's our data, not yours. If what you're saying is true, Ascension, for some reason, has a deal with its cloud provider that allows Google to search through, a…
The reality is that there is a fig leaf of privacy. HIPPA protects you from the office staff gossiping about your medical conditions. When you are admitted to the hospital, your prescriptions are sent to data aggregators in near real-time, your claims are sent to your insurer and subrogation in near real-time, etc.
Each one of these downstream providers perform their own analysis on the data. The prescription data is sold to pharmaceutical companies and wholesalers to provide KPIs for the sales organization. The insurance and subrogation people sell de-personalized data to marketing companies. The marketing companies can trivially figure out who most people are.
The end result is that you can easily get a list of every person in a zipcode who is pregnant (with estimated due date), has diabetes, had a stroke, etc.