Financial Times | Associated Free Press | May 16 2017:
Records were shared with the Google-owned AI company to trial Streams health app.
The National Health Service, Britain’s largest employer and one of the biggest in the world, will pay a large bill towards the levy.
DeepMind, the Google-owned artificial intelligence company, has been given “legally inappropriate” access to the personal medical records of 1.6m British patients by the National Health Service, according to the senior data protection adviser to the NHS.
The data controversy comes on the heels of a massive technology debacle at the NHS, involving a strain of computer virus that infected tens of thousands of devices across UK hospitals, causing operations, appointments and tests to be cancelled at one in five NHS trusts.
In a letter to the Royal Free NHS Trust in London, originally published by Sky News, the UK’s National Data Guardian, Dame Fiona Caldicott concluded that sensitive and personally identifiable patient data shared by the hospital with the British AI firm did not have an appropriate legal basis.
The data were shared with DeepMind in order to trial a mobile app, Streams, in the Trust’s hospitals. This would trigger mobile alerts to nurses and doctors when a patient’s vital signs were flagged as abnormal.
“[I]t would not have been within the reasonable expectation of patients that their records would have been shared for this purpose,” Dame Fiona said, referring to the trial period of the app throughout 2016.
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