NHS: Do you trust Google with your medical records?

When “big data” meets big money, in the form of Google, and they both meet the NHS, one of the world’s biggest holders of confidential information about patients, the results can be a little unsettling. The Information Commissioner’s Office, which monitors information rights in the public interest, has ruled that the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust failed to comply with the Data Protection Act when it gave the sensitive details of 1.6 million patients to Google’s artificial intelligence section DeepMind in 2015.

What is DeepMind?

DeepMind Technologies was the 2010 product of three artificial intelligence researchers, Demis Hassabis (left) and Shane Legg, who met while working at University College London, and Mustafa Suleyman, who dropped out of Oxford University to found a phone helpline for young Muslims before becoming a policy officer for the then-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone. Just four years later Google bought the start-up for $500m (£384m).

DeepMind defines itself as “the world leader in artificial intelligence research and its application for positive impact. We’re on a scientific mission to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how. If we’re successful, we believe this will be one of the most important and widely beneficial scientific advances ever made.”

NHS trials

The technology is able to process vast quantities of data and learn from it. Last year a million anonymous retina scans from Moorfields Eye Hospital were scanned to help train the technology to detect early signs of eye problems like macular degeneration.

The company also worked to create an app called Streams to help track people suffering from kidney problems. According to DeepMind, “hospitals like the Royal Free and Musgrove Park are able to use our system to quickly review test results for serious issues, such as acute kidney injury.” If one is found, the system sends an urgent secure smartphone alert to the right clinician to help, along with information about previous conditions so they can make an immediate diagnosis.

Data Privacy

But New Scientist magazine obtained a data-sharing agreement concerning the Royal Free Hospital Trust that sparked controversy about the ease with which a giant firm like Google could obtain sensitive patient information to help develop its app.

DeepMind said that Streams “integrates different types of data and test results from a range of existing IT systems used by the hospital.” That apparently innocent statement about gathering information went much further than earlier information released by the company, according to critics, as it showed that DeepMind had taken more information than just that relating to acute kidney injury. “The agreement gives DeepMind access to a wide range of healthcare data on the 1.6m patients who pass through three London hospitals run by the Royal Free NHS Trust – Barnet, Chase Farm and the Royal Free – each year,” said New Scientist. “This will include information about people who are HIV-positive, for instance, as well as details of drug overdoses and abortions. The agreement also includes access to patient data from the last five years.”

Ruling

After complaints to the Information Commissioner’s Office it was announced on July 3, 2017, that London’s Royal Free hospital failed to comply with the Data Protection Act in passing the personal data of 1.6m patients to DeepMind because the patients were not informed. “There’s no doubt the huge potential that creative use of data could have on patient care and clinical improvements but the price of innovation does not need to be the erosion of fundamental privacy rights,” said the ICO. “Our investigation found a number of shortcomings in the way patient records were shared for this trial. Patients would not have reasonably expected their information to have been used in this way.”

In response to the ruling, DeepMind said that “in our determination to achieve quick impact when this work started in 2015, we underestimated the complexity of the NHS and of the rules around patient data, as well as the potential fears about a well-known tech company working in health.”

“We were almost exclusively focused on building tools that nurses and doctors wanted and thought of our work as technology for clinicians rather than something that needed to be accountable to and shaped by patients, the public and the NHS as a whole. We got that wrong, and we need to do better.”

by Stewart Vickers

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