Ted's Friday Five — WTF Happened in AI Allied Health This Week? Week ending 10 July 2026

ai in allied health ted's friday five Jul 10, 2026

Ted Jedynak, the AI for Allied Health Guy · Helping Clinic Owners Implement AI Safely & Effectively for Better Clinical Outcomes.

This week the government put a dollar figure on your AI compliance, the TGA quietly redrew the line on what counts as a medical device, and a major practice management platform baked an AI assistant straight into the software your peers already pay for. None of this is theoretical — it's dated, it's sourced, and it applies to your clinic whether you've "adopted AI" yet or not.

📺 Watch the 5-minute video above, or read on for the full breakdown.
📄 Download the PDF bulletin — all signals, sources, and your action steps.

1. The December 10 Deadline Lands on Every Clinic

From 10 December 2026, amendments to Australia's Privacy Act introduce mandatory transparency duties for automated decision-making (ADM) — decisions made by, or "substantially and directly assisted" by, a computer system that affect a person's rights or interests. New APP 1.7–1.9 obligations mean any clinic using AI for intake triage, appointment prioritisation, risk-flagging, or chatbot-driven scheduling has to update its privacy policy to spell out what personal information the AI uses and what kind of decisions it makes.

Here's the part most clinic owners haven't clocked: healthcare providers are APP entities regardless of turnover, so the usual small-business exemption doesn't apply. Basic non-compliance carries penalties up to $330,000 for a corporation. Serious breaches escalate to the greater of $50 million, three times the benefit gained, or 30% of adjusted turnover. The OAIC has already named healthcare a high-risk enforcement sector for 2025–26, and regulators are advising businesses to have systems mapped and policies updated by October 2026 — well ahead of the actual deadline.

The non-obvious bit: most of the compliance content that surfaces on this will be written by law firms for other law firms — accurate, thorough, and completely unreadable to a time-poor practice owner running two chairs and a front desk. A podiatry clinic using an AI-powered booking tool that "recommends" appointment slots based on urgency could be caught by this just as easily as a bank.

What to do: list every tool in your clinic that touches AI — scribe, booking, triage, the lot — and check whether your current privacy policy discloses it. If it doesn't, fix it before October, not December.

2. Your AI Tool Might Legally Be a Medical Device

In February 2026, the Therapeutic Goods Administration released updated guidance clarifying when AI-based software meets the definition of Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) under the Therapeutic Goods Act. The line isn't drawn on whether a vendor calls something "AI-powered" — it's drawn on intended purpose and risk classification, assessed against standards like IEC 62304 and ISO 14971.

In plain English: generative AI tools used purely for scribing or note-taking are generally not regulated, because they don't carry therapeutic intent. But tools that move into diagnosis, triage, or treatment recommendations — gait analysis flags, wound assessment scoring, deterioration prediction — can cross into SaMD territory and need TGA sign-off. The TGA specifically called out "feature creep": the scenario where a routine software update quietly adds AI functionality that changes a tool's regulatory status without the practitioner ever being told.

Clinic owners are being pitched AI tools for gait analysis, wound assessment, and triage every week, and almost none of them are asking the one question that matters — "is this actually TGA-listed?" The safest, most defensible use of AI in a clinic right now is the boring admin stuff, not the flashy diagnostic add-on.

What to do: pick one AI tool you currently use or recommend in your practice. Ask it the blunt question — does this influence a clinical decision? — and write the answer down. That's a two-minute exercise that becomes your compliance paper trail.

3. AI Just Moved Into Your Practice Software, Invited or Not

SimplePractice — a major US practice management platform used heavily across allied health and mental health — has launched Care Aide, an AI suite covering session prep, note-taking, treatment planning, and client summaries, built with input from more than 1,000 practitioners. It's the clearest signal yet that AI is moving from "optional add-on you choose to buy" to "feature baked into the platform you already pay for."

This lands next to fresh adoption data: more than 80% of clinicians now use AI at work, double the 2023 rate, with nearly half reporting time savings of 130+ hours a year — over three working weeks. But 70% describe their training as inadequate, inconsistent, or simply non-existent. The tools are getting better and more embedded faster than the education is catching up.

The non-obvious implication: when Cliniko, Nookal, Halaxy and the rest of the platforms Australian allied health clinics actually run on follow SimplePractice's lead — and they will — every clinic owner is going to have AI making decisions in their business whether they asked for it or not. The market shifts from "practitioners who want to adopt AI" to "practitioners who already have it and don't know what it's doing."

What to do: check your practice software's update notes before you click accept on the next release. If a new AI feature touches patient data and you don't know exactly what it's doing with it, don't wave it through blind.

4. Ted's Live Webinar for the Australian Podiatry Association

On a more personal note — I'm running a live, hands-on webinar for the Australian Podiatry Association (APodA) on Wednesday, 5 August 2026, 6:30pm Adelaide/SA time, titled "Your Notes Are Taking Too Long. AI Can Fix That."

It's a 40-minute presentation plus 10 minutes of Q&A, live online via Teams, worth 1 hour of Category 1 CPD — free for APodA members, $100 for non-members. This isn't a lecture: you'll have an AI scribing tool open on your own screen and walk out having actually used it — generating a referral letter or specialist report from a recorded consultation, and a one-page patient explainer, in real time. It's the AI+HI=CI framework, live, with Caitlin Jeffries from the PIB SIG committee co-hosting.

Register via the APodA events page. Certificates issue 3–5 business days post-event, and sessions go into APodA's members-only webinar library afterwards.

The Bottom Line This Week

Regulation, big platforms, and adoption data are all converging on the same point: AI in your clinic has stopped being a choice you're making and started being a default you're inheriting. The Privacy Act deadline and the TGA's SaMD line are the compliance side of that; SimplePractice baking AI into its platform is the practical side. Either way, "I haven't decided about AI yet" stopped being a valid position sometime this year — the only real decision left is whether you're implementing it properly or finding out the hard way.

Ted Jedynak is a podiatrist, educator, and business coach based in Adelaide, Australia. His Clinical Intelligence Program (AI+HI=CI) helps allied health clinic owners implement AI into their practice — practically, safely, and without the hype. Find out more at tedjedynak.com/clinical-intelligence

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