Anger as Google is given access to confidential health data of 1.6 MILLION NHS patients

GOOGLE has been given access to 1.6million NHS patients' records - including information on people who are HIV positive and abortions.

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Google has access to patient records at the Royal Free NHS Trust

The tech giant said it needed the access to develop an app called Streams to help hospital staff monitor kidney disease patients.

But the agreement, between Google-owned artificial intelligence company DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust in London, suggests it has plans to access much more, critics have said.

The big question is why they want it. This a very rich data set

Sam Smith

Information from patients at Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free hospitals, all run by the same NHS trust, includes HIV test results as well as details of abortions and drug overdoses, the New Scientist revealed.

The agreement means DeepMind can access patient data from the last five years and will continue until 2017 when all copies of the data will have to be deleted.

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Google glasses are already being used in surgeries

Google said there are no separate statistics for people with kidney conditions so needs access to all of the data in order to run the app effectively.

The Royal Free Trust said the data will remain encrypted so Google staff should not be able to identify anyone.

It added its doctors approached DeepMind about developing the app.

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A statement said: "Our arrangement with DeepMind is the standard NHS information-sharing agreement set out by NHS England's corporate information governance department, and is the same as the other 1,500 agreements with third-party organisations that process NHS patient data.

"As with all information sharing agreements with non-NHS organisations, patients can opt out of any data-sharing system by contacting the trust's data protection officer."

But data protection campaigners are not happy with the spread of data Google will have access to.

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Google is using the data to develop an app

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The Royal Free hospital asked Google to develop the app

Sam Smith, of patient data campaign group MedConfidential, said: "The big question is why they want it. This a very rich data set. 

"If you are someone who went to the A&E department, why is your data in this?"

Google said it needed the general data to identify patients who could be at risk of developing acute kidney injury (AKI), which is the cause of up to 20 per cent of emergency hospital admissions, the NHS said.

It said around a quarter of cases could be prevented.

Dominic King, a senior scientist at Google DeepMind, said: "Access to timely and relevant clinical data is essential for doctors and nurses looking for signs of patient deterioration. 

"This work focuses on acute kidney injuries that contribute to 40,000 deaths a year in the UK, many of which are preventable.

"The kidney specialists who have led this work are confident that the alerts our system generates will transform outcomes for their patients. 

"For us to generate these alerts it is necessary for us to look at a range of tests taken at different time intervals."

Google is not stopping at Streams with its foray into healthcare, it will also be providing data analytics to more NHS hospital trusts with a new platform called Patient Rescue.

In development at the moment, Patient Rescue will use data from hospitals to carry out real-time analysis of clinical data and support diagnostic decisions. 

They are hoping it will help predict whether a person is in the early stages of a disease which has no symptoms yet.

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