76% of Gen Z turn to AI before seeking professional care, Aflac survey finds

Three-quarters of Gen Z adults and nearly two-thirds of millennials now turn to artificial intelligence (AI) for health support before seeking professional care, according to the fourth annual Wellness Matters survey Aflac released Aug. 4. The same two generations are the least likely to have a primary care physician at all.

For physicians, that combination is already showing up in the schedule. In the survey, 48% of Gen Z and 58% of millennials said they have a primary care doctor, compared with 79% of Gen X and 87% of baby boomers.

Nearly two-thirds of Gen Z (65%) and 61% of millennials said they delay or skip routine checkups and screenings, and 62% of Gen Z said they seek medical attention from an emergency room or urgent care, up from 51% a year earlier.

Aflac and Kantar Profiles surveyed 2,000 employed U.S. adults ages 18 to 65 in March 2026.

What's actually different about this generation of AI tools

Aflac's headline number is broader than it first appears. The company defines the professional support being displaced to include not only physicians but therapists, dietitians, personal trainers and sleep coaches, so the 76% figure covers more than a skipped office visit. The sample is also limited to employed adults 18 to 65, which thins out the baby boomer comparison considerably.

What has changed underneath the number is the accessibility of new software and tools.

OpenAI opened ChatGPT Health to all U.S. users 18 and older on web and iOS on July 23, following a limited launch in January 2026, and says more than 300 million people bring health questions to ChatGPT every week.

Anthropic released Claude for Healthcare on Jan. 11, including consumer features that connect lab results and records.

Amazon extended its Health AI assistant beyond One Medical members to Amazon.com and the Amazon app on March 10, putting it in front of roughly 200 million U.S. Prime members.

Medical Economics spoke with Amber Maraccini, Ph.D., M.A., vice president and head of health care and life sciences at Medallia, shortly after the initial launch of these consumer-facing AI health tools, and she said these tools no longer behave like symptom checkers. They interpret results, pull across multiple data sources and explain findings conversationally.

"It actually becomes a narrator of health data," Maraccini said.

“For the first time, patients are able to encounter meaning before they actually encounter their clinician," she said, adding that it’s also risky, because the emotional reaction to a result now forms before anyone with clinical context is in the room. “This is a really big deal."

What should a physician do when a patient arrives with an AI-generated conclusion?

Engage the work rather than dismiss it, Maraccini said, because the behavior itself is not new. Patients have always brought printouts, apps and search results to appointments, and AI is the current version of that effort.

Her recommended opener: "Let's look at this together." The clinical advantage is context the tool never had.

"There's no way for ChatGPT to have the entire context. It only has the context of the information you are feeding it." A physician who demonstrates that broader read gains credibility rather than losing it.

She was also blunt about the reliability of AI tools. "It's not that it can make mistakes, it will make mistakes," Maraccini said, arguing that physicians should teach patients how to use the tools and what the disclaimers mean instead of avoiding the subject.

The warning sign she watches for is relational. A red flag, she said, is a patient saying it is easier to ask AI than to ask a doctor, or that "AI is more empathetic than my doctor." In her reading, that points at the communication in the exam room as much as at the technology.

Why the patients who wait show up sicker

Rosemarie Aznavorian, D.N.P., RN, executive vice president of client services and chief clinical officer at MedPro Healthcare Staffing, told Medical Economics that patients are turning to AI because they can’t access physicians, and the alternative is a wait.

Related content: Why your patients feel like they can’t get an appointment

"They're doing a number of things to avoid going to their physician's office if they can even get a reasonably timed appointment," she said. "They're using AI to self-diagnose, which many times can have misguided information."

For example, an AI tool may tell someone a symptom is not cardiac-related when it is, because so many presentations mimic one another and require an actual clinical assessment.

Asked how concerned clinicians should be about patients using these tools as a substitute for care rather than a supplement, Aznavorian said: "We should be worried, and we need to be acutely aware," she said, also cautioning against scolding — patients bring this material in trying to be resourceful, and "not be judgmental" is the approach that keeps them engaged.

"If they are treating themselves before they get there or attempting to treat themselves, they're going to be sicker when they show up," she said.

What happens when young patients never establish primary care

The generational gap Aflac measured is visible in the urgent care market too. Andrea Giamalva, M.D., FAAFP, chief medical officer at Experity, said in an interview with Medical Economics that market data show roughly 10% of baby boomers without a primary care physician, about 20% of Gen X, around 30% of millennials and nearly 40% of Gen Z.

Related content: Young adults are slipping away from primary care, and they aren't the only ones

Some of that is preference and some is supply. The federal Health Resources and Services Administration projects a shortage of 87,150 primary care physicians by 2037, with nonmetro areas facing a projected 42% gap.

Giamalva noted that urgent care clinics tend to open precisely where those gaps are widest, which has made them "the front door to health care for many Americans." Patient expectations moved with them.

"We're living in what we'll call the Amazon-Uber-DoorDash world," Giamalva said, and urgent care was built for that. Primary care, mostly, was not.

As proof, she pointed to research finding it would take a primary care physician some 27 hours a day to manage the panel they are expected to manage. The underlying study, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine in 2022, put the figure at 26.7 hours, dropping to 9.3 with full team-based care.

Fragmentation does not relieve the pressure, it moves it. Yalda Jabbarpour, M.D., a family physician and vice president and director of the Robert Graham Center, described the loop in an interview with Medical Economics: a patient who cannot get in goes to urgent care, gets part of the problem answered and still ends up in her office. "So that's two visits when it could have been one," she said, "and that decreases access on a population scale altogether."

She also flagged the scheduling mismatch. "I always think it's strange that we're open for eight to five visits. That's when patients are at work," Jabbarpour said.

OpenAI's January report on health care use found the same pattern from the other side: about 7 in 10 health-related ChatGPT conversations happen outside typical clinic hours, and more than 5% of all messages the company sees are health related.

The economics argue for defending the relationship anyway. The 2026 U.S. Primary Care Report, developed by the Robert Graham Center and co-funded by the Milbank Memorial Fund and The Physicians Foundation, found that adults with chronic disease who have a usual source of primary care carry nearly 54% lower total health care costs and a 20% lower hospitalization rate.

Primary care still receives less than 5% of U.S. health spending, and 29.7% of adults report no usual source of care.

What physicians can realistically control

Almost none of the levers here sit with an individual practice. Matthew Owenby, Aflac's chief human resources officer and chief administrative officer, said in the release that digital-first health resources are not "inherently negative," and that the alarming part is the rate at which Gen Z is delaying preventive care, "greatly lessening the opportunity for early detection."

Jabbarpour's fix is structural and slow: pay for primary care differently and staff it adequately. "We know that there is a primary care crisis, and it's coming from a workforce shortage," she said, "and really the only way that we're going to solve that is to better resource primary care offices."

In the meantime, the practical guidance from these interviews converges on flexibility and hours rather than on the technology itself.

Sarah Matt, M.D., a practicing physician, health technology strategist, and Medical Economics advisory board member, put it plainly on Off the Chart: physicians need to be flexible.

"Some patients are going to do great with virtual care, and some won't. It's not a one size fits all." Giamalva made a version of the same argument for triage, arguing that the industry has to get "the right patient to the right place at the right time" or lose people in the shuffle.

Maraccini's test for whether any of this is working is narrower, and easier to check against a Tuesday clinic. If the tools are being used well, she said, physicians should notice a specific change in the visits themselves: "You're actually going to start seeing better questions, not longer visits."