A clinic in Melbourne refuses to treat patients who do not consent to their use of an AI scribe. This development is shocking but not unsurprising. AI scribes are popping-up all over our health system, promising productivity gains to clinics. But they come with significant risks: risks to patient privacy, risks to the quality of healthcare, and risks to doctors’ liability. It is entirely reasonable for a person to reject the use of AI scribes in the course of their healthcare.
It is therefore completely unacceptable for clinics to refuse treatment to patients who do not want an AI scribe listening-into their private conversations with their doctor.
It is also unacceptable for the corporations behind AI scribes to pass the responsibility to individual doctors to check the quality of the output produced. The AI corporations need to take responsibility for the quality of their product and not hand it off to professionals who should be focusing on treating patients instead of marking the homework of an AI bot.
Regulators and legislators urgently need to step in and address this situation: patients need a legal right to refuse AI scribes without retaliation. Doctors need to be protected from AI scribe errors. AI scribes and the corporations that make them need to be regulated alongside other medical products.
Quotes attributable to Tom Sulston, Head of Policy:
“No-one in Australia should be denied healthcare, full stop. But especially no-one should be denied healthcare because they don’t want to be forced to give their private medical data to an AI corporation. Regulators and legislators need to step-up and provide Australians with a legally-enshrined right to refuse AI systems without facing repercussions to our health.“
“Corporations building AI scribes for healthcare are operating in an under-regulated no-man’s land where they provide interpretation of medical information without needing to be regulated as providers or medical devices. The Minister for Health, Mark Butler, urgently needs to intervene and close the loopholes through which AI scribes are putting Australians’ privacy and health at risk.“
“AI scribes put all of the responsibility for a transcription’s accuracy on the doctor using the scribe. It’s not acceptable for the corporations building the software, and the clinics benefiting from it, to make doctors solely responsible for the output of these systems. They need to take responsibility for the quality of their product and not hand it off to professionals who should be focusing on treating patients instead of marking the homework of an AI bot.”
Media contact for interview:
media@digitalrightswatch.org.au
Tom Sulston: +61 448335466