Major medical records vendor Epic Systems moves away from Google Cloud, citing security concerns, and indicating plans to rely Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure. This is big news in the healthcare market, and likely something that hospitals and healthcare providers can’t help but take note of—especially if they are current customers of Google Cloud for medical research, data storage, or other IT operations.
Google’s partnership with Acension Healthcare has recently been in the sights of privacy advocates and in the news—now the subject of a federal probe, instigated by the HHS Office for Civil Rights, a federal agency that enforces patient privacy under HIPAA. Other partnerships with healthcare providers across the U.S. have experts questioning whether the potential commercialization of patients’ personal health data is something Google can be, or should be, trusted to refrain from.
