GOOGLE’S top health and cloud executives said Tuesday the company isn’t misusing health data from one of the biggest U.S. health care providers, pushing back against news reports that have triggered criticism from politicians of the search giant. Google employees only have access to patient information in order to build a new internal search tool for the Ascension hospital network, said David Feinberg, head of Google Health. No patient data are being used for Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) research, he added. The Alphabet Inc. company’s contract is governed by U.S. health privacy law that permits it access to patient records solely for the task of organizing Ascension’s various health records systems and building a tool to make them easier to search, Feinberg said. “That’s all we’re allowed to do and that’s all we are doing,” he said. Google’s deal with Ascension has been under scrutiny since The Wall Street Journal reported Monday the company was collecting identifiable data on millions of Ascension patients and using it to build new products. On Tuesday, the paper reported that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ civil rights office was starting an inquiry into the situation. Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, declined to comment on the alleged inquiry and representatives of the Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment. Ascension’s health data are being stored on Google Cloud servers but sequestered so only Ascension employees can access it, according to Google. “All data are logically silo-ed to Ascension and housed within a virtual private space encrypted with dedicated keys,” Kurian said. “Google does not sell, share or otherwise combine data from Ascension with any other data.” Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Google’s activity was a “blatant disregard for privacy” and “beyond shameful.” News articles and social media posts have questioned why Google needs to collect patient information and speculated that the search giant could eventually use the data for advertising. That isn’t true, Kurian and Feinberg said. When Google does work with other companies on artificial intelligence research, it always strips out personally identifying information, Kurian said. “We never actually have Google employees understand individual patients’ data when it goes into the model. We have other technologies that de-identify it,” he said. (SD-Agencies) |