A United States federal regulator has initiated an investigation into a cloud computing deal between Alphabet Inc’s Google and Ascension Health, which would give Google access to detailed health information of millions of patients, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) newspaper reported.
The Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services will look into the data collection to ensure the partnership is in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which safeguards medical information, the WSJ quoted the office’s director, Roger Severino, as saying.
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“We are happy to cooperate with any questions about the project,” Google said in a blog post later on Tuesday, regarding the federal inquiry.
Representatives of the health and human services department did not respond to a request for comment, Bloomberg reported.
However, Google’s top health and cloud executives have pushed back against criticism over privacy issues from US lawmakers and patients, saying that the company is not misusing data from one of the biggest healthcare providers in the US.
Google employees only have access to patient information in order to build a new internal search tool for the Ascension hospital network, said David Feinberg, head of Google Health in a Bloomberg report.
No patient data is being used for Google’s artificial intelligence research, he added.
The company is governed by US health privacy law that permits access to patient records only for the task of organising Ascension’s various health record systems and building a tool to make them easier to search, Feinberg said.
“That’s all we’re allowed to do and that’s all we are doing,” he said.
On Monday, Google said patient data “cannot and will not be combined with any Google consumer data.”
Ascension’s health data is being stored on Google Cloud servers but sequestered so only Ascension employees can access it, according to Google.
Global News 
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