Clinicians are using AI scribes, but what happens to your medical data?

Per The Conversation, more than forty percent of Australian doctors are now using AI scribes — tools that listen to medical consultations and use language models like ChatGPT to generate clinical notes. For clinicians, the appeal is clear: eliminating hours of paperwork frees them to focus on patients. But the technology carries serious risks. Recent research shows approximately twenty percent of AI-generated clinical notes contain errors significant enough to affect patient diagnoses, often stemming from AI hallucinations or biases that hit especially hard for patients from culturally diverse backgrounds or for whom English is a second language. The privacy picture is equally murky: patients have little visibility into where their medical data goes, who can access it, or how these lightly regulated AI systems handle it. Australia's regulators have left a significant gap — the Therapeutic Goods Administration currently exempts AI scribes from medical device regulation unless they explicitly provide diagnostic advice, despite evidence that even transcription errors can shape patient care. The author argues Australia's regulators must treat AI scribes like any other medical device, with disclosure requirements and rigorous testing — or risk eroding patient trust in the health system itself.

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