A data-sharing agreement between Google and the United Kingdom's National Health Service allows a company owned by the tech giant access to comprehensive healthcare data at three hospitals to help build an app to help hospital staff monitor patients with kidney disease, reports New Scientist.
Google-owned DeepMind has been granted access to the healthcare information of approximately 1.6 million patients until September 2017. The agreement says Google cannot use the information in any other part of its business, and upon expiration of the agreement, Google must delete all data, according to the report. Additionally, the data will be stored by a third party contracted by Google.
While DeepMind reportedly is building an app focused on kidney disease, the company says it requires all patient data because there is no separate dataset for people with kidney conditions, according to the report.
Sam Smith with data privacy group MedConfidential, told New Scientist it appears DeepMind may be after something larger than kidney function because of the troves of data to which it has access. "What DeepMind is trying to do is a build a generic algorithm that can [make predictions] for anything — anything you can do a test for," he said in the report.
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