> DeepMind did not have the requisite approvals for research from the Health Research Authority (HRA) and, in the case of identifiable data in particular, the C

> DeepMind did not have the requisite approvals for research from the Health Research Authority (HRA) and, in the case of identifiable data in particular, the Confidentiality Advisory Group (CAG) This is kinda the crux of the matter. All the exciting, and likely beneficial, machine-learning that we would expect from a relationship between an organisation that is good with analytics and another organisation with a lot of data, can happen only under the guise of research. Any kind of medical research requires ethical approval, and in the UK, this is not an easy process. It requires a responsible organisation (usually academic, like a university, but it can be commercial), extensive documentation on how the data will be collected, handled, processed. Consent and information leaflets, duration of study etc etc is all part of this, and this needs to forwarded to the regional ethics committee - a terrifying panel of around 8 people who are there to ensure that you've thought of everything surrounding the ethical aspects of your research. After this, the hospital's R&D department need to check through and make sure that the things they are responsible for - i.e. ensuring patient data does not leave the premises/country without good reason, are all ok. There's good reason for all of this, too - it's not that long ago that major breaches of medical ethics have been part of research [1], and medical confidentiality is taken seriously in the UK. As an example of research done right - here is an observational study on nearly 1 million patients, tracking their admission, discharge from hospital and subsequent complications [2]. Every single patient consented and agreed to their information being used by the researchers for these purposes. Personally, I'm excited to see machine/deep learning applied to medical data - it's clearly going to be of huge benefit (well, it's happening anyway within academic institutions), but no one should be suggesting it is done without the usual ethical approval. Probably what needs to happen here is for Google or similar to pair up to organisations used to obtaining ethical approval for research - Universities, and work collaboratively with them. [1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41811750/ns/health-health_care/t/ugly-past-us-human-experiments-uncovered/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41811750/ns/health-health_care/t/u... [2] http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b4583 http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b4583