As per a report by the WSJ, Google has been collecting Personal Health Records for a long time, and now they have been caught.
Google Caught Collection Personal Health Records:
In an effort dubbed “Project Nightingale,” Google secretly collected millions of patient records across 21 states on behalf of a health care provider called Ascension, a Catholic health care system based in St. Louis, reports The Wall Street Journal. According to the study, neither doctors nor patients of the provider were made aware of the effort.
Technically, the companies have done nothing wrong, and legal aid is available under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to allow them to do so.
Rob Copeland, of the Wall Street Journal, wrote that the data collected in the program include “lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete history of health, complete with patient names and birth dates,” and that up to 150 Google employees may have access to the data.
A spokesman disputed the suggestion that Google was secretly storing the health records of millions of Americans, saying that the sole purpose of such an arrangement was to provide services back to the health care provider and that it did not announce that it was doing so earlier because it was still in the very early stages.
The information that is distributed without knowledge provides an impression of ethical concerns. Google later in the day confirmed the partnership by posting a blog.