Background:
A digital revolution is reshaping healthcare, fundamentally altering how patients and health professionals engage with, diagnose, and manage health. From AI-assisted diagnostics to automated decision-making, digital technologies, including generative artificial intelligence (genAI) and large language models (LLMs), are transforming healthcare at an unprecedented pace. Having the necessary skills to access and use these emergent tools is fast becoming a critical determinant of health. Strengthening digital health literacy is now recognised as a national priority to enable all Australians to benefit from this digital and AI transformation. While there is enormous potential there is also significant risk. GenAI chatbots offer accessible, scalable, simplified health information; however, unless carefully prompted they consistently produce texts for adults with high education. Errors and/or hallucinations are commonplace especially in under-represented user groups, and responses can be dangerous, particularly in the context of young peoples’ mental health. Users must know how to ensure output is accurate, safe and personally relevant. The most accessible health information is often found on social media. But, because content is often commercially driven it promotes harmful, low or no value health interventions. This has escalated the complexity and challenge of finding reliable high quality health information and healthcare. Yet, despite these problems consumers and health providers are using AI tools widely and use is growing. Patients and health providers now urgently require AI health literacy to support safe and effective use of AI. This presentation will consider how we can build AI health literacy to support equitable AI-enabled healthcare and what can be done to ensure the issues of access, inclusion, trust, and evidence are not left behind.