STAT+: The companies paying hospitals to hand over patient data to train AI

Artificial intelligence models are ever-hungry black boxes that need boatloads of bits and bytes from a wide stream of real-world data in order to produce insights about patients and their care. To satisfy this need, a trove of companies have popped up to buy patient data from hospitals and sell it to those wanting to train AI or do research. 

Earlier this week, health data company Truveta, which normally traffics data like patient immunizations, social determinations of health, lab tests, and pharmacy and insurance claims, announced that it will be starting a new Truveta Genome Project to create a massive database of genetic information from 10 million patients over the next five years to pair with their health record data. A crop of companies including Avandra, Gradient Health, Segmed, and Protege offers de-identified patient images to companies and researchers.

Though this is legal, Johns Hopkins bioethicist Marielle Gross compared the process of taking people’s data to train AI or make scientific discoveries to Soylent Green, the 1973 Charleton Heston film where a popular processed food product turns out to be made of human bodies. “We’re taking bits — whether you want to interpret that digitally, physically — of people and we are chopping them up and creating products and selling it back to them,” she said. 

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