The "Dr Google" era of self-diagnosis by search engine is officially over — and it's been replaced by something far more sophisticated, and far more disruptive. At Australian Healthcare Week, held alongside the Healthcare 2040 Expo in Sydney, eHealth NSW chief executive Richard Taggart told delegates that patients are no longer typing symptoms into a search bar. They're opening ChatGPT, and bringing the results straight into the consulting room.

Some patients turn up with tidy AI-generated summaries. Others say nothing about the tool at all. Either way, health leaders agree the shift is already happening, and the system now has to catch up.

Why Trust Is the Real Risk

Healthdirect chief executive Bettina McMahon put it plainly: the debate over whether AI chatbots give accurate health advice is somewhat beside the point when adoption is already this widespread. The real question, she argued, is what responsibility organisations across the health sector now carry to make that AI use safer.

That responsibility looks different depending on who's using the tools. Data shared by the Australian Digital Health Agency at the event showed that people using AI for health questions in Australia skew toward non-English-speaking backgrounds, lower health literacy, and questions asked outside of clinic hours — in other words, some of the groups who find the health system hardest to access in the first place. For many, an AI chatbot isn't replacing a doctor. It's filling a gap the system was already leaving open.

The Undeclared Third Party in the Room

But that convenience comes with a new kind of clinical risk. Aspen Medical's chief medical officer described a case where a patient consulted ChatGPT before their appointment, was told their symptoms might indicate pancreatitis, and turned up to their GP visit anxious — without mentioning the chatbot at all. Doctors are increasingly navigating consultations with what one panel called an "undeclared third party" in the room, and when that AI input isn't disclosed, it can quietly undermine trust between doctor and patient.

Bringing It Into the Open

The fix, according to speakers at the event, isn't to push back against consumer AI use — it's to bring it out of the shadows. That means clinicians routinely asking patients whether they've used an AI tool, organisations like Healthdirect optimising their own clinically governed content for the AI era, and the health system finally solving its decades-old data silo problem so that both patients and their AI tools are working from accurate information.

It's a preview of the conversations shaping Australian healthcare well beyond this one event — from data interoperability to consumer trust to the future of the GP consult itself.

Read the full report from Medical Republic on how Australian health leaders are responding to the AI-informed patient: Dr Google is dead. Long live the chatbot.

Conversations like these are exactly what Healthcare 2040 Expo (co-located with Australian Healthcare Week) was built for — bringing together the leaders shaping AI, digital health and the future of care across Australia. Join us 17–18 March 2027 at ICC Sydney.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash