Google's harvest of medical data includes names and full details of millions
Googler here, my opinions are my own, standard disclaimer.<p>I&#x27;m not going to comment on this specific case but I do have almost a decade of previous non-Google experience working in clinical documentation technology.<p>As others have said, entering into a BAA with a covered entity, as HIPAA defines it, shouldn&#x27;t be seen as a controversial action.<p>There are numerous problems in healthcare that are too complex for individual health systems to tackle.  For example:<p>* Population Health: are there emergent changes in the regional population? What do you do about it?
* Continuity of Care: The number of individual providers involved in a particular person&#x27;s care continues to grow.  How can you effectively inform the entire team--across health systems--what&#x27;s most important for an individual now?  How do you make sure nobody drops the ball?<p>To give you an idea of the scale, I have two examples.  The first is MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.  They used to have 200+ engineers working on their sophisticated home-grown EMR.  It was a huge undertaking.  But even with MDACC revenue, that development was unsustainable, and they moved to a 3rd party EMR vendor.<p>Second is the Mayo Health System.  Another huge provider with facilities not just in flagship Rochester MN, but in several other sites.  Again, there were realities that even at this scale internal development isn&#x27;t sustainable across the board and they wound up with a $100M+ adoption of a 3rd party vendor.<p>And this is mostly straight-forward CRUD-level workflows.  The technology is straightforward but the workflow expertise is not.<p>Now, try and solve some bigger problems.  You&#x27;re going to need help to do this at scale, and trying to solve it necessarily means giving access--not control of!--to medical records to drive R&amp;D.  It&#x27;s happening right now, and Google is not the only player doing this at scale.  They&#x27;re not even the largest one.<p>Lastly HIPAA controls have real teeth, in comparison to the general consumer space (at least in the US).