University of Chicago Medical Centre’s data sharing with Google puts patient privacy at risk, lawsuit alleges

A lawsuit filed on June 26, 2019,alleges that University of Chicago Medical Center shared with Google electronic health records of patients it treated between 2009 and 2016. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune/TSN)

About two years ago, the University of Chicago Medical Centre touted a new, ambitious partnership with tech giant Google, one aimed at finding patterns in patients’ medical records that might help predict medical issues. 

That partnership is now the subject of a potential class-action lawsuit filed Wednesday against the hospital, the University of Chicago and Google, alleging that the hospital turned over to the tech giant hundreds of thousands of medical records containing “sensitive and intimate information” without patients’ consent. The lawsuit alleges that the data wasn’t sufficiently stripped of identifying information.