Google DeepMind: From Playing Go to Solving Top Health Problems Worldwide
Patients and privacy groups not happy with sharing of medical data of NHS with tech giant.
Google's DeepMind will soon do more than let users play AlphaGo. It will soon be able to help patients with their medical concerns and health issues. A prominent hospital in the U.K. is now working closely with DeepMind developers to be able to use the technology to create an artificial intelligence that can diagnose potential eye disease and soon an app that will diagnose kidney disease.
Doctors from London Moorfields eye hospital are eagerly awaiting Google DeepMind's help. It will be able to provide cutting-edge technology to their outdated diagnostic NHS systems. This will make diagnosis as well as sharing and storing data easier and much convenient for the NHS.
Concerns over Patients' Privacy
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However, privacy groups and some patients expressed their concerns about Google's entry to the health care industry, saying that their data, especially their personal and medical records, can be shared by Google DeepMind with its other divisions. The groups and patients mentioned that privacy could be at risk especially after learning that Google's DeepMind was given access to medical and health care data of more than 1.6 million patients from three medical centers managed by London's Royal Free Trust.
DeepMind was given a go signal in May, which was in line with the agency's project to develop Streams, an app that will help doctors in attending to patients who are at risk of developing acute kidney injury or AKI. Concerns over the app being significant and useful to only a few percentage of the population but with so much data in its hands were also stressed.
Not-so-unusual Deal with Google
Looks like this was not the first time the NHS made a deal that involved sharing of patients' medical and personal records. It has been revealed that the agency has done similar partnerships with around 1,500 different companies in the past. The NHS reasoned out that asking every patient to give consent would be too impractical.
In DeepMind's deal with Moorfields, patient data was anonymized with rules saying that data can be shared only for "ethically approved" projects. Therefore, patients can choose to opt out of data sharing by sending an e-mail to their NHS Trust data protection officer.
Google DeepMind and Long-term Health Care
Google has been interested in health care and in fact has invested heavily on a number of projects. It has partnered with Calico, Alphabet's research company, which studies aging, and with Verify, who is at present developing smart contact lens that can assist diabetic patients in monitoring their blood glucose levels.
A panel of independent viewers made up of technical and clinical experts is currently being set up by DeepMind. These experts will scrutinize what DeepMind is doing through a patient engagement forum to be streamed on Sept. 25. Viewers will be able to watch live streaming video on YouTube while a Twitter Q&A will also coincide with the forum.
