Written by: Aaron Holmes
- Google is partnering with universities and hospitals across the country in order to obtain patient data to build algorithms that predict health trends.
- A newly-released contract, first published by Stat, shows how the $1 trillion company maneuvers to obtain valuable health data without handing over any money.
- Google offers schools and hospitals early access to its health algorithms in exchange for anonymized data.
- The company now faces a lawsuit that alleges it can identify patients, breaching privacy laws.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
For years, Google has been quietly gathering people’s health data through partnerships with hospitals and universities in order to build its artificial intelligence systems meant to predict health trends.
In some cases, the $1 trillion company has maneuvered to access valuable patient data without handing over any money. It does so through contracts that promise hospitals and universities early access to its predictive algorithms in exchange for data.
Google’s broader push in to health AI could prove highly profitable for the company — in the wake of FDA rulings approving the use of AI across various medical fields in recent years, tech giants including Google, Apple, and Amazon have rolled out health services for patients and providers alike.
One contract signed in 2016 was released this month as part of a patient’s lawsuit against Google. The plaintiff alleges that the company obtained health data that could easily be de-anonymized and tied to people’s real identities.
The contract, first published by Stat, outlines the terms of Google’s agreement with the University of Chicago, offering access to its algorithms in exchange for data. It outlines how the patient data would be anonymized in order to protect patients’ privacy; however, the lawsuit alleges that because the university gave Google data on the date and time patients signed into health services, Google could easily pair that information with location data it gathers from users’ smartphones to identify people.
It’s not the only contract Google has with a university health center — the University of California, San Francisco, shared 1.4 million patient records with Google through a similar 2016 contract.
Google did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
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