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From the original WSJ article... > Staffers across Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent, have access to the patient information, documents show, including some empl

by mfer 7y ago

From the original WSJ article... > Staffers across Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent, have access to the patient information, documents show, including some employees of Google Brain, a research science division credited with some of the company’s biggest breakthroughs. I'm struck by the wide access of those within Alphabet to health information that's not anonymous. Is this how other healthcare companies are doing it?

Kalium 7y ago
One reading of this is that it's a cross-departmental collaboration, rather than just a single division.
- mfer 7y ago
  Maybe and sort of. Alphabet is a conglomerate, right. Alphabet is the parent company that owns Google, LLC. I'm personally surprised to see talk of the data crossing the Google / Alphabet company boundary. That makes it cross company collaboration, right?
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  That's the difference everyone here is talking about though. Normally in the healthcare industry, you engage a cloud provider, and it's "you store this data for us." Full Stop. You don't look at it. You don't analyze it. You don't share it. You don't touch it. It's our data, not yours. If what you're saying is true, Ascension, for some reason, has a deal with its cloud provider that allows Google to search through, analyze, etc etc etc. It sounds like all sorts of rights were given to Google. That's an irregular agreement. It's not normally how things are done.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    That's a very naive view of what happens. It's exactly how things are done, except that it's a one-stop shop. The reality is that there is a fig leaf of privacy. HIPPA protects you from the office staff gossiping about your medical conditions. When you are admitted to the hospital, your prescriptions are sent to data aggregators in near real-time, your claims are sent to your insurer and subrogation in near real-time, etc. Each one of these downstream providers perform their own analysis on the data. The prescription data is sold to pharmaceutical companies and wholesalers to provide KPIs for the sales organization. The insurance and subrogation people sell de-personalized data to marketing companies. The marketing companies can trivially figure out who most people are. The end result is that you can easily get a list of every person in a zipcode who is pregnant (with estimated due date), has diabetes, had a stroke, etc.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      We're talking about cloud providers here, not pharmaceutical or insurance providers. There are different levels of interaction required to accomplish different operational objectives. Giving a cloud provider this sort of access is, as I said initially, highly irregular. There is just not that same level of collaboration needed with your cloud provider. Just as a for instance, there are very good operational reasons on your side that pharmaceutical partners need the data to be reasonably certain that the 1000 doses of highly controlled substance X that they previously sent to you, or distributed on your behalf, were administered to people who both required the medication, and who actually exist. That pharmaceutical partner needs to have the ability to be certain of this prior to sending you, or distributing for you, the 10000 additional doses you are all of a sudden requesting. By contrast, there is no operational reason on your side that a cloud provider needs to know the names and addresses of the patients in your database.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        Cloud providers can provide all sorts of services. Who says they are just selling dumb storage services? If you use Office 365, they process your data to do analytics. Some they expose to you (Delve, MyAnalytics), others they don’t. In government, they do even more. Medicaid systems are usually run by third parties, who also sell services to providers to optimize billing.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

by mfer 7y ago

Kalium 7y ago

One reading of this is that it's a cross-departmental collaboration, rather than just a single division.

mfer 7y ago
Maybe and sort of. Alphabet is a conglomerate, right. Alphabet is the parent company that owns Google, LLC. I'm personally surprised to see talk of the data crossing the Google / Alphabet company boundary. That makes it cross company collaboration, right?
bilbo0s 7y ago
That's the difference everyone here is talking about though. Normally in the healthcare industry, you engage a cloud provider, and it's "you store this data for us." Full Stop. You don't look at it. You don't analyze it. You don't share it. You don't touch it. It's our data, not yours. If what you're saying is true, Ascension, for some reason, has a deal with its cloud provider that allows Google to search through, analyze, etc etc etc. It sounds like all sorts of rights were given to Google. That's an irregular agreement. It's not normally how things are done.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  That's a very naive view of what happens. It's exactly how things are done, except that it's a one-stop shop. The reality is that there is a fig leaf of privacy. HIPPA protects you from the office staff gossiping about your medical conditions. When you are admitted to the hospital, your prescriptions are sent to data aggregators in near real-time, your claims are sent to your insurer and subrogation in near real-time, etc. Each one of these downstream providers perform their own analysis on the data. The prescription data is sold to pharmaceutical companies and wholesalers to provide KPIs for the sales organization. The insurance and subrogation people sell de-personalized data to marketing companies. The marketing companies can trivially figure out who most people are. The end result is that you can easily get a list of every person in a zipcode who is pregnant (with estimated due date), has diabetes, had a stroke, etc.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    We're talking about cloud providers here, not pharmaceutical or insurance providers. There are different levels of interaction required to accomplish different operational objectives. Giving a cloud provider this sort of access is, as I said initially, highly irregular. There is just not that same level of collaboration needed with your cloud provider. Just as a for instance, there are very good operational reasons on your side that pharmaceutical partners need the data to be reasonably certain that the 1000 doses of highly controlled substance X that they previously sent to you, or distributed on your behalf, were administered to people who both required the medication, and who actually exist. That pharmaceutical partner needs to have the ability to be certain of this prior to sending you, or distributing for you, the 10000 additional doses you are all of a sudden requesting. By contrast, there is no operational reason on your side that a cloud provider needs to know the names and addresses of the patients in your database.
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      Cloud providers can provide all sorts of services. Who says they are just selling dumb storage services? If you use Office 365, they process your data to do analytics. Some they expose to you (Delve, MyAnalytics), others they don’t. In government, they do even more. Medicaid systems are usually run by third parties, who also sell services to providers to optimize billing.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]