Consumer Attitudes Towards AI in Digital Health: A Mixed-Methods Survey in Australia

TL;DR

This study explores Australian consumers' attitudes towards healthcare AI, revealing moderate optimism, concerns about safety, and a preference for AI-generated summaries when perceived as high quality and well-governed.

Contribution

It provides novel insights into consumer perceptions of concrete AI healthcare artefacts and emphasizes the importance of governance and communication in deployment.

Findings

Consumers see AI as useful and easy to use but worry about safety and data privacy.

AI-generated summaries are preferred over clinician-written ones for quality and empathy.

Participants often cannot distinguish AI summaries from human-written ones.

Abstract

AI applications are increasingly being introduced into digital health. While technical performance has advanced rapidly, successful deployment mainly depends on consumer attitudes, especially to patient-facing applications. However, most existing research examines consumer attitudes towards healthcare AI at an abstract level rather than in response to concrete artefacts. We report a mixed-methods survey study in Australia (N=275) examining consumer readiness, acceptance, trust, and risk perceptions of healthcare AI, combined with a scenario-based evaluation of an AI-generated versus clinician-written consultation summary. Participants expressed moderate optimism and strong perceived usefulness and ease of use, but also substantial concerns about accuracy, safety, and data use. In the scenario task, the AI-generated summary was strongly preferred for quality, empathy, and overall usefulness, yet identification of the AI summary was near chance. Findings show that consumers judge AI through concrete communication quality and visible human governance, underscoring the need for clinically supervised deployment frameworks beyond technical performance alone.