NHS to share 1.6 million medical records with Google

Up to 1.6 million NHS patients will have their medical records given to Google in an attempt to identify people at risk of health complications.

London's Royal Free NHS Trust, which runs three hospitals in the capital, will encrypt the data to prevent individual identification, according to a document seen by New Scientist.

Google's artificial intelligence medical project, DeepMind, will also receive details about drug overdoses, blood tests, HIV status and abortions in the past five years. The system will mine the data and predict which patients are at highest risk of acute kidney injury (AKI).

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Usually occurring as a complication from another condition, AKI can result in anything from reduced function to total failure. Kidney Research UK estimates it affects one in six patients admitted to UK hospitals, contributing to around 40,000 deaths per year.

Ultimately, the Royal Free Trust and DeepMind want to develop an app that would provide medical staff with automated alerts about at-risk patients before they show signs of AKI. Artificial intelligence could run software that would notify doctors of a wide range of potential complications based on their patients' medical histories.

However, some patient advocacy groups expressed concern over the sharing of private medical data and the prospect of automated alerts.

Sam Smith, who runs health data privacy group MedConfidential, warned New Scientist of the long-term implications of the data-sharing: "What DeepMind is trying to do is build a generic algorithm that can do this for anything – anything you can do a test for. The big question is why they want it."

Joyce Robins, from Patient Concern, said it was "worrying that hospitals want to use software to identify an illness, rather than doctors".

Many others welcomed the new development, however, arguing that artificial intelligence will soon be a valuable tool for medics.

Graham Silk, of patient group Empower: Data4Health, stressed the need for appropriate privacy measures, but was otherwise enthusiastic about the project. "We're at the beginning of 21st-century medicine here," he told The Times.