Nova Scotia Doctors Say AI Chatbots Are Now Shaping Patient Visits
Patients in Nova Scotia are increasingly consulting AI chatbots before they see a doctor, and physicians say it is changing how they practise, CBC News reported on Saturday. Dr. Roshan Abid told the broadcaster she used to feel like the second doctor her patients consulted, after Google. With tools such as ChatGPT Health and Claude for Healthcare now a tap away, she says she has become doctor number three.
Abid said people are understandably worried when a symptom appears, but chatbots often miss the critical thinking and patient context that doctors are trained to apply. She pointed to online information about GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, which she said is often riddled with misinformation she has to help patients unlearn. That missing context matters most for the thousands of Nova Scotians who have no family doctor and for people trying to avoid long emergency room waits.
Dr. Matthew Clarke, chief medical information officer at Nova Scotia Health, said thousands of people in the province already use AI, and it helps when patients say so. Many do not volunteer it for fear of stigma, he said, though it often becomes clear later where their ideas came from. Clarke also sees an upside: some patients use chatbots to organize their thoughts and work out how to talk to their doctor, which he said has helped them understand their situation.
What it means in practice
Doctors use AI too, from transcribing visits to searching databases for difficult diagnoses, and Clarke said strict and evolving rules in Canada and Nova Scotia govern that use to protect patient privacy. The province’s own AI-powered virtual assistant, Nova, is also regulated, he said. General-purpose chatbots are a different matter. Dr. Peter Lin, director of primary care initiatives at the Canadian Heart Research Centre, warned that people who type health details into consumer platforms generally let the company use that data as it sees fit, including to train its systems, and that an account ties the information to them. Even well-intentioned companies face breaches and bad actors, he said.
The debate echoes concerns about chatbots feeding Quebec voters faulty election information and calls for tiered AI transparency infrastructure in Canada. Health care is also where Canadian developers are building purpose-made tools, as our look at top AI healthcare companies in Canada shows. The practical advice from the doctors CBC spoke with is simple: treat a chatbot as a starting point, tell your clinician what it said, and think twice before sharing identifiable health records with a consumer app.
What to watch: whether Nova Scotia Health issues public guidance on chatbot use, how regulators treat the consumer health features AI companies are launching, and whether more clinics adopt AI scribes with explicit patient consent.