Cerner was interviewing Silicon Valley giants to pick a storage provider for 250 million health records, one of the largest collections of U.S. patient data. Google dispatched former chief executive Eric Schmidt to personally pitch Cerner over several phone calls and offered around $250 million in discounts and incentives, people familiar with the matter say. Google had a bigger goal in pushing for the deal than dollars and cents: a way to expand its effort to collect, analyze and aggregate health data on millions of Americans. Google representatives were vague in answering questions about how Cerner's data would be used, making the health-care company's executives wary, the people say. Eventually, Cerner struck a storage deal with Amazon.com The failed Cerner deal reveals an emerging challenge to Google's move into health care: gaining the trust of health care partners and the public.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal accused Google of stealthily collecting sensitive patient data from millions of Americans without their consent. The New York Times soon followed with its own report, offering more detail on "Project Nightingale" and noting how it was likely to rile up privacy advocates. Forbes then published its own story, followed by another article from Business Insider, each drip-feeding more details about this initiative. When, you might ask, will it all end? The problem is not the reporting; it's that Google's own ambitions in health care have no clear limits, which is something that Project Nightingale illustrates.

In 2017, Google was two days away from posting 112,000 chest X-rays taken of more than 30,000 patients on public servers before last-minute privacy concerns put a stop to the project. The X-rays were part of a program conducted with the National Institutes of Health to see if Google's machine learning tools could be used to better identify disease markers using visual information. The X-rays were collected at a government research hospital in Bethesda, Maryland where a large number of clinical research studies were being conducted. According to a new report in The Washington Post, based on emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Google and NIH began collaborating on the project in the summer of 2017 and were hoping to reveal findings from the project at an artificial intelligence conference in Hawaii on July 21. The X-rays were analyzed by Google's TensorFlow, an open source machine learning software that was developed by the Google Brain Team in 2015.

Google has gained access to a huge trove of US patient data - without the need to notify those patients - thanks to a deal with a major health firm. The scheme, dubbed Project Nightingale, was agreed with Ascension, which hopes to develop artificial intelligence tools for doctors. Google can access health records, names and addresses without telling patients, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the news. Google said it was "standard practice". Among the data the tech giant reportedly has access to under the deal are lab results, diagnoses, records of hospitalisation and dates of birth.

Google secretly gathered millions of patient records across 21 states on behalf of a health care provider, in an effort dubbed "Project Nightingale," reports The Wall Street Journal. Neither the provider's doctors nor patients were made aware of the effort, according to the report. The Wall Street Journal's Rob Copeland wrote that the data amassed in the program includes "lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, complete with patient names and dates of birth," and that as many as 150 Google employees may have had access to the data. The New York Times corroborated much of the report later in the day, writing that "dozens of Google employees" may have access to sensitive patient data, and that there are concerns that some Google employees may have downloaded some of that data. But Google tells The Verge that despite the surprise, it's standard industry practice for a health care provider to share highly sensitive health records with tech workers under an agreement like the kind it signed -- one that narrowly allows Google to build tools for that health care provider by using the private medical data of its patients, and one that doesn't require patients to be notified, the company claims.

Google secretly gathered millions of patient records across 21 states on behalf of a health care provider, in an effort dubbed "Project Nightingale," reports The Wall Street Journal. Neither the provider's doctors nor patients were made aware of the effort, according to the report. The Wall Street Journal's Rob Copeland wrote that the data amassed in the program includes "lab results, doctor diagnoses and hospitalization records, among other categories, and amounts to a complete health history, complete with patient names and dates of birth," and that as many as 150 Google employees may have had access to the data. The New York Times corroborated much of the report later in the day, writing that "dozens of Google employees" may have access to sensitive patient data, and that there are concerns that some Google employees may have downloaded some of that data. But Google tells The Verge that despite the surprise, it's standard industry practice for a health care provider to share highly sensitive health records with tech workers under an agreement like the kind it signed -- one that narrowly allows Google to build tools for that health care provider by using the private medical data of its patients, and one that doesn't require patients to be notified, the company claims.