A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed against UChicago and Google for alleged privacy and HIPAA violations. The lawsuit was filed in June 2019 and involved a data- sharing partnership between Google and UChicago.
In 2017, Google received anonymized UChicago patient data for research purposes. The data was sent by the University of Chicago Medical Center as part of an initiative to improve predictive analytics of hospitalizations and increase the standard of patient care.
As part of the collaboration, Google used techniques to analyze patient data to identify when a patient's health was deteriorating. The tech giant aimed to learn whether and how early intervention could prevent a patient from needing to be hospitalized.
The data sent by the University of Chicago Medical Center to Google belonged to hundreds of thousands of people who were patients of the healthcare provider between 2009 and 2016. The data contained dates of services and notes from doctors.
Edelson PC filed the lawsuit against the University of Chicago and Google for breach of privacy on behalf of the lead plaintiff, Matt Dinerstein, a patient at the Medical Center who was admitted to the hospital twice in 2015. According to the lawsuit, sensitive and confidential information regarding Dinerstein’s health was shared with Google, revealing the patient’s identity. The lawsuit further alleged that the alleged breach of privacy was uncovered after a 2018 study was published, which confirmed that annotations and time stamps were not removed from the data before it was sent to Google. The plaintiff argued in the lawsuit that while Google and the University of Chicago Medical Center claimed that the medical records used were removed, in fact, that was not the case. According to Dinerstein, considering that the data provided to Google by the university included “detailed data stamps and copious free-text annotations,” the tech giant’s expertise in data mining and artificial intelligence made it “uniquely capable of identifying record released by the university.”
Dinerstein then sought rights to Google's use of his health information. Dinerstein alleged in the lawsuit that his medical records, which were important to him, had been stolen.
Rebecca Pallmeyer, a federal judge in the U.S. for the Northern District of Illinois, dismissed the lawsuit on September 4. Pallmeyer ruled that rights are only necessary when it comes to a property right, and Dinerstein failed to prove that he had property rights in his personal health information.
