Now that Google Health has been scattered within the Google Puzzle Palace like so many marbles, it should come as no surprise that its Deep Mind-created clinician support app, Streams, is being ‘decommissioned’. The terminology, used for military ships and basis, is quite odd. Termination, or terming, would be more accurate.

The users were concentrated in the UK: University College London NHS Trust, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Taunton & Somerset, and London’s Royal Free. But all contracts had expired with the exception of the Royal Free. It’s still active there and no definite date has been published for the service’s end.

Deep Mind, Google’s AI skunk works until it was also smushed into Google, started up the Streams app with the Royal Free in 2016 or 2017 and announced plans to integrate AI into it which never came to fruition. The predictive modeling came from the NHS. In the midst of five-year contracts with various Trusts, Streams was handed off in 2018 to Google Health, requiring 1) new contracts because Google was now handling patient data, and 2) dealing with the security and NHS restrictions. Still, the Trusts sustained the app till earlier this year, except for Royal Free’s continuance.

What they will do now that Streams is heading off to Google’s Box of Forgotten Toys? Well, they could adopt Care Studio, currently piloted with Ascension and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC). Care Studio also came in for some bad publicity in 2019 when Care Studio’s predecessor, Project Nightingale, piloted at Ascension, accessed 10 million identified patient records without patient or physician consent or knowledge, including patient name, lab results, diagnoses, hospital records, patient names, and dates of birth [TTA 9 April].

Google has become a perfect example of how Big Tech stumbles and misunderstands healthcare, whether in the UK or in the US [TTA 24 Aug]. Dropping it like another Google experiment, Google+, just doesn’t cut it. TechCrunch