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…