The background.
A bombshell report released by the Wall Street Journal Monday pulled back the curtain on the highly secret ‘Project Nightingale,’ which is a current partnership between Google and Ascension – one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the U.S.
According to the WSJ, the project began in secret sometime last year when Ascension began sharing its vast patient data – including complete health histories, patient names and dates of birth – with up to 150 Google employees.
The aftermath.
The WSJ report immediately went viral (or, as viral as a healthcare article could get).
In an almost immediate response, Google issued a press release the same afternoon detailing its partnership with Ascension, stating that the business relationship is legal within HIPAA confines and has good intentions.
Ascension also released a statement, saying that the goals of the partnership are to improve patient outcomes and data usage.
That’s not stopping the Feds from opening an official probe into the partnership, though.
The 2 Sides of the Google and Ascension Controversy.
After doing a LOT of reading and research on this, there are essentially 2 schools of thought behind the Google and Ascension partnership.
Here’s what it boils down to.
Google and Ascension’s Side:
Google’s work with Ascension and its patient data is allowed by law because Google is defined as an Ascension business partner.
Additionally, the data is hosted within an Ascension-owned virtual private space within the Google Cloud platform – separate from Google’s other business functions.
Per the agreement, none of the patient data will be used to sell ads or be monetized.
With Ascension’s help, Google is trying to find solutions to healthcare’s biggest problems.
Those problems include common provider headaches like the lack of interoperability between patient medical records, advancing practical uses of artificial intelligence, and developing new technologies to leverage data for the purpose of achieving better clinical outcomes for patients.
In the long run, despite how it looks now, this partnership will be good for healthcare.
The Patient Privacy Side:
The optics surrounding the partnership could not be worse for Google and Ascension.
Although the partnership started last year, nothing (beyond one word in Google’s second-quarter 2019 earnings call) was mentioned about what was going on behind the scenes.
Ascension employees expressed concern about how the patient data was being shared with Google, yet nothing was addressed.
And yet, as soon as the WSJ article was released, Google immediately sent out a press release as soon as possible, covering its tracks.
Since Google is doing the work with Ascension for free, they clearly think that the project has an extremely high value.
But no patient or provider was told how their individual, highly sensitive patient data was being used by a company with a not-so-great track record of handling consumer data.
These types of partnerships need more oversight.
Read about the controversy from the whistleblower’s perspective themselves on the Guardian here. It’s definitely worthy of your time.
The conclusion.
Both sides have an argument here. Maybe Google and Ascension didn’t handle the partnership in a transparent way.
But that doesn’t mean they had deviant or malicious intents behind their arrangement.
The most apparent thing, though, is that these partnerships in the future will need to revolve around transparency about what’s being done with patient data.
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