Can we trust Big Tech with our health data?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 24 June 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Big Tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft are moving into AI healthcare services in a big way. But can we trust private, for-profit, companies to use our data properly? Prof Allyson Pollock, director of the Newcastle University Centre for Excellence in Regulatory Science in the UK, tell the BBC's Ed Butler she is alarmed at the rate healthcare services are being privatised in the country. And Nicholson Price, Professor at the University of Michigan School of Law in the US, warns that the stakes are different when tech companies collect healthcare than say marketing information. But Dr Robert Wachter, Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says that though these concerns are real, it may be a price we have to pay for better healthcare in the future.
Producers: Frey Lindsay, Laurence Knight.
(Image credit: Getty Creative)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today, with ever more of our health data stored and shared, are we sure we want just anyone to get their hands on it? |
| 0:13.7 | People have to have trust in where their data are going. You've got lots of new private sector organisations which are penetrating the health service and having access to data. |
| 0:24.4 | But with rising health costs and the promise of new treatments, is this a price we've just got to pay? |
| 0:30.4 | How can we possibly get the benefits of the technology for healthcare if we're not willing to share our data with systems run by private companies that |
| 0:38.2 | have a profit motive. |
| 0:39.4 | Big tech in healthcare. That's today's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:46.6 | The onward march of artificial intelligence everywhere in healthcare these days, from the |
| 0:51.3 | use of pattern recognition to detect breast cancer to the onset of |
| 0:55.8 | blindness. It's everywhere. In 2015, Professor P.S. Kean, an ophthalmologist at Britain's |
| 1:01.7 | oldest eye hospital, Morfields, decided to mobilize big tech to assist in that project. |
| 1:08.7 | The BBC's David Edmonds took up the story with him last year. |
| 1:14.1 | P.S. Keane specialises in the treatment of some common causes of blindness, |
| 1:19.4 | such as age-related macular degeneration. |
| 1:22.9 | Every day, around 200 people in the UK develop it. |
| 1:26.8 | Court early, the condition can be treated. |
| 1:29.3 | Ideally, someone suspected of having AMD needs an appointment within a fortnight. |
| 1:35.3 | But here's the trouble. |
| 1:38.3 | Morefields get 7,000 urgent referrals a year. |
| 1:42.3 | But only about 800 of them turn out to have the condition. |
| 1:46.6 | The problem is that, you know, how do you deal with all those patients? |
| 1:50.4 | To speed it up, the obvious solution, thought PS Keene was AI. In the Moorfield's database, |
| 1:57.3 | there were 5 million retinal scans, and it grows daily. Could a machine be taught to read these |
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