My Health Record
and your notes

The note a clinician writes in their own clinical system is the primary record of the encounter. My Health Record, operated by the Australian Digital Health Agency, is a separate, national, shared record that holds certain documents so that other treating clinicians and the patient can see them. Some documents flow to it; not everything does, and the clinician retains control over clinically sensitive material.

Keeping this distinction clear is the foundation. An AI scribe drafts the note in your own record; whether and what reaches the shared record is a separate decision governed by its own rules and the clinician's judgement.

Clinicians have discretion over what is shared to My Health Record, and patients have their own controls over their record, including the ability to set access controls and to have certain information withheld. This shared, consent-aware design means that uploading to the national record is a deliberate act, not an automatic consequence of writing a note. A clinician decides what is appropriate to share, taking account of sensitivity and the patient's wishes.

This is exactly the kind of decision that should never be automated away. A documentation tool that drafted a note and pushed it to a shared record without a human deciding would be removing a judgement that belongs to the clinician and, in part, to the patient.

The principle that governs an AI-drafted note is the same principle that should govern anything reaching a shared record: a named clinician reviews it before it goes anywhere. A draft is a draft until the clinician has read it, corrected it, and decided its destination. That discipline covers both signing the note into your own record and any decision to contribute a document to My Health Record.

So the arrival of an ambient scribe does not change the shared-record rules; it slots into them. The scribe drafts, the clinician reviews and signs, and the clinician decides what, if anything, is shared. The human judgement sits in the same place it always did.

Some information is more sensitive than the rest of a record, and both the law and the design of the shared record recognise that. A clinician thinking about what to share weighs sensitivity, relevance to other treating clinicians, and the patient's expressed wishes. A patient explainer that sets out, in plain language, how their information is handled supports that conversation and is worth having ready.

An AI scribe does not change any of these considerations. What it changes is the effort of producing the note in the first place, freeing the clinician to give the sharing decision the attention it deserves rather than rushing it at the end of a long day.