Google has been given access to up to 1.6 million NHS patient records in a deal that reignites the row over how sensitive data is used to improve care.
The Royal Free hospital in London will share patients’ encrypted medical histories in an attempt to create an automated system to identify people at risk of fatal complications.
The hospital is working with DeepMind, Google’s medical division, to develop a program that reviews blood tests and medical records to predict which patients are likely to suffer acute kidney injuries.
The condition kills an estimated 15,000 people a year but can be prevented by simple checks, which doctors hope the Google deal can automate. DeepMind will apply an algorithm to encrypted data under conditions that it says are controlled by NHS data protection rules.
Phil Booth, of medConfidential, a health campaign group, questioned why the company needed patients’ entire histories.
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“What do they want to use it for?” he asked. “It looks like it could be used for anything they could dream up. That just doesn’t pass the smell test. There are existing and strong processes for doing safe medical research using data but this project seems to have followed none of them. To ensure patient confidence, properly run projects require transparency on what is being done, and why.”
Graham Silk, of the patient group Empower: Data4Health, defended the project, saying: “The principle of using patient data to enable doctors and researchers to get better outcomes for patients is a good one.”
He said there was a need for proper safeguards, but likened the nervousness around data sharing to fears about internet shopping in the early days of the web. “We’re at the beginning of 21st-century medicine here,” he said.
Joyce Robins, from Patient Concern, was not convinced, saying that many people would be horrified to have their personal information shared with Google. “It is worrying that hospitals want to use software to identify an illness rather than doctors,” she said.
DeepMind insisted that information on a patient’s history was needed to make an accurate assessment and that taking the whole record was the only practical way to do this.
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Mustafa Suleyman, the company’s co-founder, said: “We are working with clinicians at the Royal Free to understand how technology can best help clinicians recognise patient deterioration — in this case acute kidney injury.
“We have held, and will always hold, ourselves to the highest possible standards of patient data protection. This data will only ever be used for the purposes of improving healthcare and will never be linked with Google accounts or products.”
The Royal Free says the deal with Google is on the same terms as data-sharing agreements with other suppliers, such as the company that makes electronic patient record software.
The hospital said in a statement: “The Royal Free London approached DeepMind with the aim of developing an app that improves the detection of acute kidney injury by immediately reviewing blood test results for signs of deterioration, then sending an alert and the results to the most appropriate clinician via a dedicated handheld device.
“Absolutely no patient-identifiable data is shared with DeepMind. All information sent to and processed by this app, named Streams, is encrypted and is only decrypted once returned to the clinician’s device.”