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Mayo Clinic to partner with Google
- vchak1 7y agoMaybe start with transforming the "present" of marketing, and avoid hyperbole?
- Ancalagon 7y agoAnd here I was hoping for cost-reduction plans. Undoubtedly the cloud service provisioning will do the exact opposite.
- nraynaud 7y agoYeah, what force exactly would bring the cost down?
- ProAm 7y agoThis doesn't seem good for anyone but Google.
- dzader 7y agocurious why you say that - wouldn't doctors (and thus patients by extension) using these tools stand to benefit as well? (in addition to Google who is definitely getting the most upside here)
- not_a_cop75 7y agoInformation. Google is already like the privatized arm of the NSA in a sense. Most people don't like oversharing with any one company.
- dzader 7y agowouldn't medical data be covered under HIPAA? (I really don't know - it's possible anonymized data etc. might get around those restrictions). I would hope that when it comes to medical data laws would prevent some of the usual privacy concerns around googles data collection.
- enriquto 7y agoare you being sarcastic? If that is the case, you are a really good writer! you got me until I did a second lecture of your text.
- disabled 7y agoHIPAA anonymized data sets can be combined with any other data set(s) to reidentify the individual, and it is 100% legal to do so. In fact, data brokers (there are 4,000-8,000 of them in the US) will sell lists of people with, for example, 150 columns of data tied to them, with one of the columns being "presumed medical conditions". Social media companies and other marketers use these lists.
- dzader 7y agohuh TIL. Seems like HIPAA should changed to account for this type of situation as it seems like corporations can't be trusted to do the right thing
- dragonwriter 7y agoIn theory, HIPAA anonymized data sets should be nearly impossible to reidentify in combination with any other data set. In practice, that's probably still true for “safe harbor” deidentification, but less true for “expert determination” deidentification [0] that doesn't need the safe harbor rules. The latter option should be eliminated. [0] https://www.hipaajournal.com/de-identification-protected-health-information/ https://www.hipaajournal.com/de-identification-protected-hea...
- disabled 7y agoThis is naive. Read spooky23's posts and the links posted by him. It is a horror story and a huge violation of their privacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20183968 You can find more details about the situation by just searching for: "Enfamil" site:news.ycombinator.com Then on the news.ycombinator.com URL ctrl/command + f "Spooky23" Anyways it is extremely bad.
- aazaa 7y agoBuzzwords aplenty, but not one word about what this does for patients. Count me skeptical.
- roywiggins 7y agoWell they could hardly change the past of healthcare....
- java-man 7y agoIs google going to sell data obtained from this collaboration to the advertizers? Insurance companies?
- jakeogh 7y agoOf course they will, and of course they will say they wont. Their primary business is human deception. https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/ https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/
- randcraw 7y agoTrusting Mayo a bit to do the right thing here, I believe they will rein in Google's lust for reselling personal data, and limit the partnership to providing labeled data Google will use to train their latest pattern recognizers. I suspect Mayo also hopes Google can break some new ground in analytics beyond munging mere patterns. No doubt Mayo would love to explore all kinds of advances in medical practice using novel monitoring and instrumentation, esp. in the clinic. No telling what Google has proposed: maybe a lot, maybe only a little. Their announcement says nought.
- elpakal 7y agoSorry for the cynicism, but this worries me. > This strategic partnership will combine Google’s cloud and AI capabilities and Mayo’s world-leading clinical expertise to improve the health of people—and entire communities—through the transformative impact of understanding insights at scale. Ultimately, we will work together to solve humanity’s most serious and complex medical challenges. I'm sorry but this is just pure silicon valley speak. Are Mayo's patients really going to know what Google is doing with their clinical data? When I hear "partnering with Google to create machine-learning models for serious and complex disease", I have a hard time believing Mayo patients know what they are signing away when they consent to this (if at all, which is not mentioned?)
- disabled 7y agoThey have no idea. Even data from continuous glucose monitors (most commonly used in type 1 diabetes) are directly shared with insurance companies, where certain patients with diabetes are "flagged" as "problem patients": https://type1tennis.blogspot.com/2016/05/when-data-fluxes-collide-random.html https://type1tennis.blogspot.com/2016/05/when-data-fluxes-co... I have 2 rare diseases, and one of which was discovered via NIH funds at the Mayo Clinic in the early 2000s. I also have type 1 diabetes, and I can attest to the veracity of the claims made on the blog post. For somebody like me, the situation is unwinnable, if I want to live. HIPAA is a joke because it is perfectly legal to combine other data with the HIPAA anonymized source to identify the individual. Every day, leaving the US looks better.
- avocado4 7y agoYou should move to Canada or Europe, they'll take care of your rare diseases.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- opsiprogram 7y agoHow would you combine HIPAA with another data source to identify the individual? Not suggesting it can't be done, just wondering how one might do that? Being able to link data that can identify a person to some de-identified would only be possible if the original data was not properly de-identified right?
- Forge36 7y agoThe article is a PR announcement without much substance. What AI projects? What part of the cloud platform will they use? What will it be used for? It sounds like a nice partnership, but it's not clear what Mayo will be doing with it
- disabled 7y agoI "love" how Google just throws in "rare diseases" in to this, via their press release, as somebody who lives with 2 rare diseases that affect my peripheral nervous system. Actually, one of the diseases I have was discovered in the early 2000s on NIH grant funds at the Mayo Clinic. This sounds wild, but it is true: Rare diseases are an absolute cash cow, and everyone should watch this. Our healthcare system in the US will be unsustainable if orphan drugs are not regulated (Which is why I naturalized as an European Union citizen, in addition to being American. I fret and worry about getting proper access to medical care every single day.): https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/the-weekly/rare-diseases-orphan-drugs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/the-weekly/rare-diseases-... (I do not believe that healthcare for all is unsustainable, but an unregulated free market will make it unsustainable.) Just in case anyone was wondering, it is common to have a rare disease, and they are unfathomly expensive to have. In the US, the definition of rare disease (which really should be called "orphan conditions" based on the law) is tied to "orphan drugs" which in theory can collectively benefit 10% of the general population. There are a ton of orphan drugs being approved at the moment, which cost between hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to millions per year, in the US. The European estimate on rare diseases is more realistic and 6-8% of the general population has a rare disease. So, do not think think that it cannot happen to you. You are naive to believe otherwise.
- jiveturkey 7y ago> The European estimate on rare diseases is more realistic and 6-8% of the general population has a rare disease. But not the same rare disease. Orphan drugs collectively may benefit 10% of the population, but not individually. Not that I disagree with what I think is your main point: a profit driven medical industry hurts those at the extremes, relative to those in the median. I don't know how awful that is or isn't. 100 years ago, those folks would just have suffered. It's a profit motive, in some part at least, which has fueled advanced treatments. If all healthcare and healthcare research were socialized, maybe the expensive treatments wouldn't exist at all. What I'm not sure about is if you are critical of, or in favor of, this collaboration. Bringing "commercial-grade" AI to healthcare sounds like a good thing to me on its face. I've read here and there (perhaps it's sensational, but still) how some AI can be order or orders of magnitude more accurate than doctors when evaluating x-rays, or scans, or other diagnostics. My worry here is in the profit motive of Google and the fact that, well, they suck these days in that they do not care about user privacy.
- MrZongle2 7y agoColor me cynical, but 20-25 years ago companies were touting what the "future of healthcare" looked like. They, and the people they were marketing to, would have been appalled if at the time they could have seen at what it became. At least in the United States.
- effnorwood 7y agoThey won’t.
- mjevans 7y agoHealthcare has many forces driving less than optimal outcomes. The for profit status of treatment in "western" medicine. Laws like HIPPA that are well intention-ed, but written by lobbyists and out of field and out of date lawyers/politicians who don't understand the actual nature of data protection or the need for a patient to be in control of their medical records in meaningful ways. There's also the lack of a national / international identity and legal / data security infrastructure: this makes it very difficult to associate government issued IDs to patient records and requests / authorizations for limited sharing of those records. In a less crazy world the outcome might look something like this: Everyone has a Digital ID; this is a government issued or signed PKI based contract approval key. It would be stored in a dedicated, open hardware, firmware and software, wallet that is used only for making strong signatures. The Digital ID allows the patient to log in to government websites and associate their healthcare coverage (ideally single payer, but if they're rich and have a luxury plan that could be linked as well) at various medical centers to their (emergency) care records. They can also actively choose to, or passively allow, the sharing of specific records from one provider to anyone else, as well as obtain personal copies of all of their records from all of their providers. Any time a provider is no longer covering a given patient stewardship of those records transfers to the government agency providing this service (and is paid for out of a general fund based on taxing providers so they don't have to deal with this). A management matrix might also allow for general records access approval, in the case that the patient just wants their entire medical history and ongoing updates to be provided to their pool of physicians. Through that framework outside entities can also obtain access keys and links for the records at other providers which they are authorized to view the records at. Also; of course, all of the records would be required to be in "open, patent free, free to implement record formats as standardized by the medical industry software and equipment providers"; a specific format wouldn't be legally mandated, but the use of formats that are intended to be interchangeable would be.
- elpakal 7y agoopen records, tied to a uniquely identifiable data point? what if those digital ids were _leaked_?
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- gkolli 7y agoHopefully, we get specific information about what Google Cloud will be doing with Mayo Clinic to better patient outcomes - the article is filled with handwaving.
- musicale 7y agoGlad to see the companies we know and love getting into healthcare: Amazon: People who shopped for MRIs also shopped for... Facebook: You have been tagged in this x-ray... Apple: Glucose Monitor Pro, starting at $999/$42 monthly (gold/64GB, Apple Pencil and iCloud storage sold separately...) Google/YouTube: Dr. Oz, Stephen Fry, and Ben Shapiro DESTROY healthcare in amazing TEDx talk...
- bt848 7y agoPure word salad. This is what you get when you import executives from Hell^WOracle.
- wheelerwj 7y agoPlease don't.
- mark_l_watson 7y agoI have worked on medical/improving patient outcomes consulting projects three or four times - enough to get a feeling for how difficult it is to accomplish all of: keep patient data private, convince data partners to spend the resources to sanitize data, share benefit of research amount partners, and work with different data formats. I heard a keynote at NACL a few years ago that was a call to arms to solve these problems.
- tootie 7y agoThey mention "digital transformation" at the end and man Google is not the right partner for that. They are a software company, not business consultants. I'm sure they have no respect for what it takes to make non-tech people change their way of thinking.
- sjg007 7y agoI’m pretty excited about this. Although it’s in Rochester it will boost the MN tech scene. There’s a lot of opportunity here for Google to learn about healthcare as well. Their AI tools should help improve outcomes. I can think of half a dozen promising projects just based on the current scientific literature. I don’t think google is going after EHRs here. Epic is too dominate. Also google could just buy an EHR company if they really wanted to get into that space. Interestingly Epic is pitching AI tools as well.
- a_imho 7y agotldr; US clinic hands over millions of patients records.
- Angostura 7y agoJust in case anyone didn't spot it, yesterday Apple announced Research.app that will let Apple Watch users opt in to supplying data to research projects https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2019/09/apple-announces-three-groundbreaking-health-studies/ https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2019/09/apple-announces-th... Three projects announced at the moment. I feel fairly comfortable with these, since they are opt in and not aimed at users who are suffering a healthcare crisis while deciding whether to share their data.
- en-us 7y agoInteresting decision considering Mayo is an Epic customer, and Epic has their own cloud AI product. I guess Mayo doesn't have much confidence in them to deliver?
- throw78153081 7y agoUC San Diego Health’s CIO spoke his mind about Epic’s core offerings in 2017. https://healthitanalytics.com/features/epic-systems-machine-learning-is-the-ehr-usability-solution https://healthitanalytics.com/features/epic-systems-machine-... Epic sat on its hands too long and missed whatever calling it had in this space.
- tempodox 7y agoSheesh. “All your data are belong to us” gets more toxic every day.
- isaacyes 7y agoGoogle Deepmind x The Royal Free hospital didn't quite go as planned, Information Governance wise.