Doctors’ AI usage raising privacy and safety concerns

By Annabelle Banfield

Australian doctors are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence scribes for note taking, raising concerns for the safety and privacy of vulnerable patients.

It has triggered worries potential productivity benefits are being placed ahead of ensuring patients receive safe, accurate and confidential medical advice and treatments .

The findings come in a Digital Rights Watch report entitled Off The Record: AI scribes in Australian healthcare.

Four-in-10 general practitioners use AI scribes, the report found, with uptake doubling in the past year according to the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners.

After listening in to your consult, some tools could provide diagnoses, write referral letters and prescriptions, Digital Rights Watch policy head Tom Sulston said.

He said it was normal for patients to have concerns around AI usage, but there was no need to panic, or ban the technology.

“Patients have a reasonable concern about ‘have these things been tested? Have they been proven safe?'” Mr Sulston told AAP.

“If something goes wrong, is the insurance going to cover them and keep patients looked after?”

The report detailed a situation where a Melbourne psychiatrist refused new patients who would not allow AI to record and transcribe consults.

Patients were particularly wary of transcription services when discussing socially stigmatised conditions, such mental or sexual health, it found.

Mr Sulston said medical access cannot be contingent on agreeing to have an AI scribe.

“Patients need to be able to say no and still get access to health care,” he said.

“It needs to be okay for patients to feel uncomfortable about (AI) and say ‘can we just have an old-fashioned consult the way that they used to be done?'”

AI scribes were found to have lower transcription accuracy for patients with non-English accents and from minority backgrounds, leading to poor health outcomes.

Doctors were legally required to get a patient’s consent to use a scribe, but this was often done in a rushed way, if at all, the report found.

Digital Rights Watch recommended better oversight of AI scribes in health care, including enforceable guidance on consent-gathering.

“It’s likely these tools are going to be around for a long time, so it’s really important we handle them properly, and we understand where the risks are and that they’re being managed,” Mr Sulston said.

IMPORTANT LEGAL INFO This article is of a general nature and FYI only, because it doesn’t take into account your personal health requirements or existing medical conditions. That means it’s not personalised health advice and shouldn’t be relied upon as if it is. Before making a health-related decision, you should work out if the info is appropriate for your situation and get professional medical advice.