Google’s Quest for Medical Records will Lead to New Products from Google  
[Thursday, January 16, 2020] 

A couple of months back, there was a lot of hoopla when it became public that Google made a deal with one hospital chain to access personal medical data of millions of patients without patients’ consent. It seems that was but a tip of the iceberg. This week the Wall Street Journal reports that Google has made several other similar deals with hospital chains and other owners of medical data with a vision to acquire medical records from tens of millions of consumers in the US. Google claims that this data will be used to develop search engines specific for patient information which will be used by doctors, nurses, and eventually patients. While Google is obviously keeping its business plans under wraps, the data could be easily used to train algorithms for diagnostic and healthcare management. These gobbling of data Google and other information business companies has exposed a loophole in the HIPPA rule. The HIPPA rule was created to protect patient privacy regarding personal medical records but the law allows doctor, hospitals and insurance companies to share data with others in name of record management. And these institutions are increasing using that permission to share data with companies like Google for short-term and long-term benefits. While both parties claim it is all being done for the betterment of patient care, but these are also for-profit businesses. Hence it is fair to suspect the true intent of these deals. The fact is that this sharing of medical records with information companies like Google is inevitable. But unless clear rules delineating the principles of such information sharing in the context of near-term and long-term applications are created quickly, we might get in an age of uncontrolled exploitation of data for economic gains.