The Nightingale Project

Abstract

Revealed by the Wall Street Journal in 2019, the Nightingale Project was designed as an agreement between Google Health and the Ascension Healthcare Family to transfer patient data, without patient permission, from Ascension’s 2600 hospitals and clinics to Google for further data wrangling and to inform Google’s own significant healthcare inquiries. First viewed by independent advocates as a privacy nightmare and a further encroachment by Big Tech on individual liberties, it is the contention of this paper that, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nightingale and similar projects may not go far enough in data-sharing, and should include cooperation across international borders. One possible method to ensure that exchange may be the creation of markets for healthcare data from across the globe.