The NHS has now a 5 year plan with Google/Deepmind projects to employ their services to increase the efficiency of the healthcare system.
Quote:Potential areas of future collaboration include developing hospital support systems such as bed and demand management software, financial control products and private messaging and task management for junior doctors. (On the private messaging front, NHS staff informally using messaging apps like WhatsApp to quickly share information has previously been suggested as a risk to patient data confidentiality.)
They also say they want to work together on real-time health prediction — which is where the pair’s first effort (an app called Streams) has focused — involving a range of healthcare data to try to identify the risk of patient deterioration, death and/or readmission.
Reading medical images, and even monitoring the foetal heartbeat when a pregnant woman is in labour are other listed areas of interest.
However it seems there are privacy concerns with this move:
Quote:“Direct care is between a patient and a clinician. A doctor taking steps to prevent their patient having a future problem is direct care. An organisation taking steps to reduce future events of unknown patients (e.g. fluoridation) is not,” argues Sam Smith of MedConfidential.
So any thoughts on this?
Would you want Google to increase the quality and efficiency of your healthcare, if it meant it has to collect your data?
