I would be much more upset to find out a governemnt employ on a deadline used Google Sheets or Airtable to share my medical data instead of an Excel doc on a secure government file server.
" For customers who are subject to the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), G Suite and Cloud Identity can also support HIPAA compliance"
"UHS says all U.S. facilities affected by apparent ransomware attack
Computer systems at Pennsylvania-based Universal Health Services began to fail over the weekend, leading to a network shutdown at hospitals around the country."
Not that HIPAA applies in the UK (and at this point it's not even certain that Google can be GDPR compliant even it they wanted to) but that bit you quoted applies to G Suite customers who have to enable that thing in the account settings.
It is implausible that every hospital, clinic, lab and other medical organization in the UK would sign up to G Suite and deploy it to every of their employees; or that the British government would negotiate some kind of procurement contract with Google quickly for all that to be practical.
Absent those issues, Google Sheets has a limit of 18k columns and 5m total cells, in this case the issue was that they hit Excel's 16k column limit. Not much of an upgrade there.
Having looked at the marketplace for HIPAA compliant solutions for educational therapy patient record keeping (patient CRM, whatever the industry term is), I'd feel so much safer having my data in the hands of Airtable than the absolute dumpster fire that was every offering I saw.
I don't really agree with much of google any more but I was at one point fairly involved in a project there. They do have some more secure systems for government use that isn't the crazy leaky ad cesspool gmail and docs is.
The docs are used for data into the advertisement systems.
I've heard on the grapevine that several fortune 500 companies are on O365 because Google wouldn't disassociate docs from data gathering, even at the level of high touch high paying customers and they rightfully consider their internal documents to be part of their IP. Microsoft says "sure" and flips a secret "don't even gather stack traces on the server" flag for these customers.
I would be much more upset to find out a governemnt employ on a deadline used Google Sheets or Airtable to share my medical data instead of an Excel doc on a secure government file server.