I don’t where you live. But almost all of bigtech US cloud is problematic (Read: Illegal to use) for storing or processing of Personal information according to the GDPR if you’re based in the EU. Don’t know about HIPPA and other non-EU legislation. But almost all cloudservices use US bigtech as a subprocessor under the hood. Which means that the use of AI and cloud is most likely not GDPR-complaint. Which you could mention to the right people and hope they listen.

Edit: It’s illegal to use for the processing of the patients PII, because of transfer to insecure third countries and because bigtech uses the data for their own purposes without any legal basis.

Edit 2: The same is the case with your, and your colleagues PII.

In my opinion privacy and GDPR is the same in this case. I think most public authorities is required to have a DPO, fx hospitals or the relevant health authority. The DPO can help answer your and your bosses questions on the mentioned questions.

Hope you figure it out.

Do your patients know that their information is being transcribed in the cloud, which means it could potentially be hacked, leaked, tracked, and sold? How does this foster a sense of distrust, and harm the patients progress?

Could you leverage this information and the possibility of being sued if information is leaked with the bureaucrats?

Dunno, maybe collect the news of every private digital data leak in recent years and show how unsafe it really is?

You’re going to lose this fight. Admin types don’t understand technology and, at this point, I imagine neither do most doctors. You’ll be a loud minority because your concerns aren’t concrete enough and ‘AI is so cool. I mean it’s in the news!’

Maybe I’m wrong, but my organization just went full ‘we don’t understand AI so don’t use it ever,’ which is the other side of the same coin.

I would have work sign a legal discharge that from the moment I use the technology, none of the recordings or transcription of me can be used to incriminate me in case of an alleged malpractice.

In fact, since both are generated or can be generated in a way that both sounds very assertive but also can be adding incredibly wild mistakes, in a potentially life and death situation, they legally recognise potentially nullifying my work, and taking the entire legal responsibility for it.

As you can see in the most recent example involving Air Canada, a policy has been invented out of thin air. Such policy is costing the company. In the case of a doctor, if the administration of the wrong sedative, the wrong medication, or if the wrong diagnosis was communicated to the patient, etc; all that could have serious consequences.

All sounding (using your phrasings, etc) like you, being extremely assertive, etc.

A human doing that job will know not to derive from the recording. An AI? “antihistaminic” and “anti asthmatic” aren’t too far off, and that is just one example off of the top of my head.

Shouldn’t that be a HIPAA violation? Like you can’t in good conscious guarantee that the patient data isn’t being used for anything but the healthcare.

It would be worth finding out more about how exactly the training process works, namely whether or not the AI company stores the training audio clips after training has been completed. If not, then I would say you don’t have anything to worry about, because the model itself can’t be used to clone your voice to any useful extent. Deep neural networks aren’t reversible like that. Even if they were, it’s not just trained on you, it’s trained on hundreds of thousands of people then fine-tuned to you.

If they do store the clips though, then maybe show them this article about GitHub to prove to them that there is precedence for private companies using people’s data to train AI without their explicit consent.

I would suggest that that first action item would be is to ask for (in writing) are 1) data protection and 2) privacy policies. I would then either pick it apart, or find someone who works in cybersecurity (or the right lawyer) to do that. I’ve done it a few times and talked my employer out of a few dodgy products, because the policies clearly try to absolve the vendor of any potential liability. Now, whether the policies truly limit liability would have to be tested in court.

You could also talk about how data protection, encryption, identity and access management, and governance is actually really expensive, but I’d first start poking holes in the actual policies to create doubt.

Stop using the digital voice recorder and type everything yourself. This is the best way to protect your voice print in this situation. It doesn’t work well as a protest or to educate your colleagues, but I suppose that’s one thing you can use your voice for. Since AI transcription is a cost saving measure, there will be nothing you can do to stop its use. No decision maker will choose the more expensive option with a higher error rate on morals alone.

Okay, so two questions:

1. are you in a country that falls under the GDPR?
2. this training data is to be per person?

The personalized data model will be trained on your voice. That means that it’s going to be trained on a great deal of patient medical history data (including PII). That means it’s covered by HIPAA.

I strongly doubt the service in question meets even the most minimal of requirements.

Your voice-print is worth protecting.

There’s already retirement funds activating “my voice is my password” by default, now. (You can, and absolutely should opt-out, if yours does.) And you can’t change your voice-print if it gets leaked. (Maybe with a professional voice coach, you could…)

Personally, I would change employers over this, if I had the option.

I think we’re heading towards having a group of citizens with compromised voice-prints leaked to the dark web, who have a harder time day to day through no fault of their own. Like the early SSN breach sufferers, history tells us that society says “it’s a shame”, and tries to protect the next generation properly, but doesn’t recompense those hurt by the early bullshit.

While job searching, I would also request an accomodation, and not use the voice system. It’s much easier for the employer to retain a secretary for you, than to deal with the legal hassles that will come up if they try to fire you for not using their legal-gray-area solution.

Even granted the accommodation, I would be looking for my next job though.

I assume you’ll be using Dragon Medical One. Nuance is a well established organization, with users in a broad range of professions, and their medical product is extensively used by many specialists. The health system where I live has been in the process of phasing out transcriptionists in favor of it for a decade or so.

The only potential privacy concerns a hospital would care about would be if they are storing your transcripts on their servers, because that will contain sensitive information about patients. It will be impossible to get any administrator to care about your voice data.

This tide is unlikely one you will be able to stem, but you could stop dictating and type it yourself.

So what’s your concern? I’m a bit confused.

1. Using cloud to process patient data? Or,
2. Collecting your voice to train a model?

Personally I’d be more worried about leaking patient information to an uncontrolled system than having a voice model made