The doctor won’t see you now.
Utah has launched a first-in-the-nation pilot program that will allow an AI system to renew 190 commonly prescribed medications for patients with chronic conditions.
Some medications with the potential for abuse, like pain management and ADHD drugs, are excluded, according to Politico. The program will initially cost $4 per renewal but will eventually be either covered by insurance or offered at an annual fee.
Utah is undertaking the program with Doctronic, a health-tech startup that launched in 2023. Doctronic already offers AI medical tools designed to automate some of the work typically performed by physicians, including a chatbot that provides free medical consultations and generates follow-up notes for physicians as needed.
At the heart of Doctronic’s work is removing barriers to healthcare access, cutting down costs, and easing the burden on healthcare workers, and AI can certainly do that, at least to some extent. Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly used by healthcare professionals around the country, with a recent OpenAI report claiming that 46% of American nurses use them weekly. The report also claims that 7-in-10 healthcare-related conversations with AI chatbots happen outside of normal clinic hours.
Per Politico, the decisions made by Doctronic’s AI system matched those of human clinicians 99.2% of the time, and the system will be held to the same level of responsibility as a doctor would be for any claims of malpractice.
But AI is far from a perfect technology, and mistakes can prove to be fatal in healthcare contexts. The AI could fail to catch certain drug interactions or other patient red flags, leading to disastrous consequences for patients. AI systems are also prone to being gamed, including shockingly via poetry, and that can create a dangerous loophole that can be abused by patients struggling with addiction.
There is also the issue of biases. According to a recent Financial Times report, some medical AI tools tend to downplay the concerns of women and stereotype some races and ethnicities while making their diagnoses.
While Utah is so far the only state offering the AI renewals, Doctronic is reportedly in discussion to expand the practice to Texas, Arizona, and Missouri, and is weighing a path to nationwide approval.
The legality of it all is interesting. States broadly get to set their own rules on how medicine can be practiced within their borders, and an AI that independently renews prescriptions would technically be governed under that category.
But AI-enhanced medical devices fall squarely under the regulatory authority of the Food and Drug Administration, which itself is going through a reevaluation of how it regulates AI deployment in health.
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