UBC-Melbourne Faculty Exchange Lecture

A Right to Record?  Patients with Smartphones, Doctors with AI, and the Law Caught in Between. 

There is a long-standing body of research on doctors giving patients a recording of their healthcare consultation, to support their understanding, recall and adherence to medical advice. Often, though – and despite strong evidence of benefit – patients seeking to record doctors are discouraged, refused, or advised that it’s against the law, prompting some to record covertly. This raises significant legal concerns for both patients and doctors. 

At the same time, there has been a rapid rise in doctors’ use of AI scribes, embedded in medical record systems. These scribes are used by doctors routinely to “listen in” on clinical consultations, to generate records such as progress notes, discharge summaries, and referral letters. The dramatic growth in AI scribe use, often without patient consent, has far outstripped regulation. 

In this presentation I will discuss my extensive research on the legal and regulatory issues in healthcare consultation recording by doctors and patients.  I will outline how law and policy combine to discourage patient-led recording despite the clear benefits.  Meanwhile, AI scribes remain almost entirely unregulated, despite the products’ widespread adoption, surveillance capability and complex data-handling functions. 

I will highlight the critical need for updated legal and policy frameworks to address both patient recording and the unregulated rise of AI in healthcare, to ensure that privacy, trust, accountability, and patient autonomy are upheld.

Speaker

Dr. Megan Prictor is senior lecturer at Melbourne Law School, the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she is Director of the Juris Doctor program. She also co-directs the Health, Law and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX) research group and is an Associate of the Centre for Digital Transformation of Health. Megan is a prominent researcher in topics at the intersection of law, health technology and society.  She has published widely on informed consent, genomic and health data regulation, privacy, and digital technologies in health.  Recently, she has focused her research on law and policy relating to recording and surveillance in healthcare.