A federal appeals court has rejected a class-action lawsuit against University of Chicago Medicine and Google that claimed their predictive analytics partnership violated patient privacy.
In the July decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit said patient Matt Dinerstein lacked standing to file his claims and failed to "plausibly" allege any injuries. A federal district court judge previously dismissed his lawsuit before he appealed.
UChicago Medicine and Google began partnering in 2016, with the health system sharing deidentified patient data with the tech company so it could train a predictive modeling tool to forecast patients' health and tailor their treatment plans.
Mr. Dinerstein had claimed that because he had a smartphone with his geolocation and Google apps, the tech giant could combine that with the anonymized medical data to identify him. The court rejected this as hypothetical. It also said UChicago Medicine is permitted to share patient data in "limited research-related circumstances" and that he signed an agreement stating that he would "not be entitled to any compensation" connected to it.