The Project Nightingale

Adam, Baby Rosmia A.

Camad, Almira U.
Siva, Marlon W.
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Google Cloud Platfrorm (GCP) offers

Ascension is one of the largest
a suite of computing services to do
private healthcare systems in the 
everything from GCP cost to data
United States, ranking second in
management to delivering web and
the United States by number
video over the web to AI and
of hospitals as of 2019 (Wikipedia,
machine learning tools (Knox, 2019)
2023)

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 What is Project Nightingale?
• A partnership between Google and Ascension
(a healthcare company)
• Ascension shares the data of their patients to
Google to use for advanced data analytics
• Data are used to improve health care industry
by analyzing data to create cure for diseases
• Patients are unaware if their data being used,
invading their privacy
The Purpose of Project Nightingale
The partnership of Ascension with Google is
to improve its patient care system. The
healthcare organization wanted to centralize
its electronic record by moving its data to the
cloud. They hoped that faster and easier access
to patient information would help health care
providers and benefit patients. The data is
used to provide additional ways to discover
different tests that could help diagnose
patients (Brush, 2020).
What factor or events led to this delimma?
• In 2019, the Ascension and Google started a
partnership to develop a software database to store
medical records
• Records of over 50 million patients have been
released to Google through Project Nightingale and
at least 150 Google employees have gained access to
these medical records.
• In November 2019, a Wall Street Journal article
about Project Nightingale was published, gaining
public attention. Concerns have been raised about
the project and whether it threatens the data security
of Protected Health Information (PHI)
What are the implications of this dilemma for
society?

• Invasion of privacy is unethical

• The patients do not have the freedom to refuse
to share their information, which violates Data
Privacy Act
• Violates the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• Patients were unaware of their data being shared
Why is it important to question the moral and
ethical issues surrounding innovation in S & T?

• The patients involved has no knowledge that their

data have been shared. The institution should ask
for permission first
• Sharing names, address, birthdate, diagnoses and
lab results, without the permission of the person
involved is invasion of privacy. They have the right
to know under the Data Privacy Act
• The Project does not have an “out” option and so
the patients cannot refuse to share their
information. This violates the Data Privacy Act
In the face of this dilemma, why is it still important to study STS?

The Project Nightingale indeed has its ethical

issues; however, it cannot be denied that the
project has its potential. If successfully
implemented, the medical field indeed will
improve. Health experts will find it easier to create
medicines by analyzing the data shared.
Despite the issues, the development of this S&T is a
big help and studying it means finding a way of
improvement. It is rather preferable if the issue will
be resolved
 References:
• Brush, K. (2020, February 4). Project Nightingale. Health
IT. https://www.techtarget.com/searchhealthit/definition/Project-
Nightingale
• Knox, K. (2021, August 13). What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?
A Cloud Guru. https://
acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/what-is-google-cloud-platform-g
cp
• Studocu. (2021). Group 4 Project Nightingale - Science, Technology
and Society - Mapúa - Studocu.
https://www.studocu.com/ph/document/mapua-university/science
-technology-and-society/group-4-project-nightingale/24624813
• Wikipedia contributors. (2023, January 27). Ascension (healthcare
system).
Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(healthcare_s
ystem)