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Melbourne psychiatrist refuses new patients who don’t consent to AI note-taking
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
47 points (98.0% liked)
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If psychiatrists are deciding to require acceptance of AI note-taking, the legal liability of the psychiatrists and penalties for errors in the notes are not enough and should be increased.
Not to mention malpractice insurance up the wazoo... As it be should for doctors.
Just pay for perfectly functional, deterministic, local, voice transcribing like dragon dictate and actually read it afterwards for errors. Or hire a person with an NDA. Sending privileged information overseas to known data miners for transcription is pants on head bonkers given the alternatives.
Need to have a chat with my doctor to see if he's one of the 40% (there's a fucking scary number from the RACGP, talk about burying the lede).
I'm with you on this I think.
I have no problem with anyone using an AI scribe (though I would prefer one that was on device rather than cloud based). I am aware of things like Lyrebird Health that integrate with EHR management software - frankly, anything that allows the practitioner to focus more solely on the patient is a good thing. After all, they are meant to be treating the patient in front of them, not the computer screen.
The prior point about legal liability is accurate IMHO. Medical health records are functionally a legal record, and should be treated as such. Responsibility for review, redress of inaccuracies etc cannot be waved away as "ChatGPT did it". If the practitioner is willing to take the onus of that on, and treats the scribed document with the same fidelity, chain of provenance etc as other records, I'm probably ok with it.
Requiring patients to consent to cloud-based AI scribing as a condition of access is where it gets uncomfortable, and your point about local alternatives is exactly why. If deterministic, on-device transcription exists and does the job, the justification for mandating a cloud pipeline through a psychiatric service gets pretty dicey, pretty fast.
I think I can see a way to have Dragon Dictate record the audio, convert it to text and then have on device AI pull out relevant bits to populate a template. That doesn't abrogate the need to actually LISTEN to the patient but it might fix that 'capture' part of the funnel.
Absolutely.
As long as it's on device (or local network, I'd be fine with a e.g. a server for a practice, but say a macbook pro should do the job fine, with full disclosure to patients) it's OK. Indeed go ahead and use whatever voice transcription / processing you want e.g. whisper or QWEN LLM, don't care as long as it's local. The article however cites 'Heidi health AI/ Microsoft', and my policy for anything with AI in the title is 'distrust unless verified' especially wrt health data.
Admittedly I don't know 'Heidi health AI/ Microsoft' from a box of nails, but Microsoft's fingers in the pie spooks me immediately. Frankly no commercial AI presents as trustworthy enough for sensitive data in general and incoming IPOs are only going to make that worse as they desperately seek monetization.
Agreed. I'm all in on home lab / local LLM stuff. And entirely OUT on microslop.
(Which reminds me, I need to turn my Github into a billboard for Codeberg and then strip Github. Watching the traffic count on Github, the only clear signal I see it "bots crawl this shit daily; enjoy", despite being politely told no)