UK Edition
A Google-owned artificial intelligence company may have gained access to NHS blood test results without patients’ knowledge, according to a High Court lawsuit over 1.6m people’s health records.
DeepMind, which was bought by Google in 2014, may have been handed the results of blood tests that were “processed by the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust laboratories” according to legal filings seen by The Telegraph.
Google DeepMind says the case is “without merit” and has pledged to fight it in court.
The claim about blood tests was made as part of a larger case brought against Google DeepMind by Andrew Prismall, a former Royal Free patient.
His claim questions whether blood test results were also given to Google DeepMind, and allege that the US-owned business “failed satisfactorily to respond” to his lawyers’ requests for “clarification”.
Between 2015 and 2019 Google DeepMind was handed 1.6m people’s medical records by the Royal Free. These were used to train artificial intelligence algorithms powering a mobile app called Streams.
NHS administrators from the Royal Free signed a data sharing agreement with Google DeepMind which was supposed to make the records transfer lawful. In 2017 the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ruled that the NHS trust had broken the Data Protection Act.
Elizabeth Denham, the then Information Commissioner, said the Royal Free failed to show it was “necessary and proportionate to process 1.6m partial patient records” just to test the Streams app. The NHS trust gave legally binding undertakings to the ICO as a result.
Mr Prismall, who is supported by City law firm Mishcon de Reya, first filed his class action-style against Google DeepMind last year. He withdrew it after a Supreme Court ruling in another case involving Google last year set a precedent making it impossible to continue.
Re-filed in May under different laws, the representative action seeks damages for all of the 1.6m people whose records were transferred to the artificial intelligence healthcare company.
A Google DeepMind spokesman said: "This claim is without merit and should the claimants pursue it further, we will contest it in the courts.”
Streams was intended to help detect early signs of acute kidney injury (AKI), a condition the NHS says is linked to 100,000 hospital deaths per year. A 2009 study found that a third of those deaths could have been prevented with “the right care and treatment”.
The case is being financed by Litigation Capital Management Ltd, a commercial funding agency. Many recent class action-style cases in British courts have been brought with the backing of these for-profit companies, leading to speculation about the motives behind these cases.
James Hartley, law firm Freeths’ head of dispute resolution, said the cost of running a data breach lawsuit could be “anything between 15 and 30 million [pounds], sometimes more.”
“Which sounds ridiculous,” added Mr Hartley, who helped represent the Post Office scandal victims in their fight for compensation, “but that is the scale of these things.”
Phil Booth, coordinator of campaign group MedConfidential which helped bring the data sharing to light, said: "It's perfectly possible to carry out open, ethical, responsible science and health research that has real benefits – such as when Deepmind partnered with Moorfields Eye Hospital and discovered that AI can detect signs of general health problems purely from eye scans.
“What Big Tech needs to learn is that there are consequences when it puts together secret backroom deals like this one, that breach trust when they take medical data without permission from real people’s lives.”