Ascensiona Catholic, non-profit health systemincludes 34,000 providers who see patients at more than 2,600 hospitals, doctor offices, and other facilities across 21 states and the District of Columbia.
For Google's part, the company is developing new software that employs artificial intelligence and machine learning to make care suggestions for individual patients. Google's ultimate goal is to develop a searchable, cloud-based tool to host and examine massive amounts of patient datawhich it could then market to other health systems.
Internal documents seen by WSJ indicate that Ascension also hopes that the Google-mining will help identify additional ways to generate revenue from patients, such as ordering more medical tests.
Health privacy experts told WSJ that the project appears to be legal under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 .