Need to top up your prescription for asthma medication? If you’re in Utah, you can do it in minutes from your web browser for a $4 fee — without talking to a doctor.
Utah residents can now use an artificial intelligence chatbot to renew some commonly used prescription drugs under a first-in-the-nation pilot program. Regulators say the experiment could inform the future of AI-driven health care in the state.
The AI service, Doctronic, can process 30-, 60- or 90-day renewals for certain medications that have already been prescribed by a licensed provider, according to the Utah Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy. The service will not issue new prescriptions or handle refills for controlled or addictive substances.
The program’s goal is to help free up doctors to focus on patient care and make medicine more accessible and affordable, the AI policy office said.
Several AI companies have made forays into providing health care advice, but the Utah pilot marks the first time a state regulator has empowered a chatbot to handle prescriptions — a role long reserved for licensed health care providers.
The Utah Department of Commerce announced the pilot Tuesday after it quietly launched in December. A few hundred people in the state have already used Doctronic for prescriptions, according to the company’s founders.
“This is a major milestone to demonstrate how AI can improve access to care and health outcomes,” Doctronic co-founder Matt Pavelle said in a statement. “ … We hope other states follow Utah’s lead.”
Margaret Busse, the executive director of Utah’s Department of Commerce, said that the state is “proceeding cautiously” and approved the trial after months of research, and that her office wants to encourage AI innovation.
“We know we have a giant crisis of affordability in health care, and if we don’t allow technology to be able to settle in in ways that can really help, we’re never going to see the benefits,” Busse said.
The American Medical Association’s CEO and executive vice president, John Whyte, cautioned against automating health care processes. Physicians should “remain at the forefront of decision-making and to validate AI outputs to ensure accuracy and patient safety,” he said in a statement.
“While AI has limitless opportunity to transform medicine for the better, without physician input it also poses serious risks to patients and physicians alike,” Whyte added.
Doctronic launched in 2023 and operates a nationwide telehealth service using AI. Its site calls Doctronic a “private and personal AI doctor” and encourages users to “talk to me just like you would your regular doctor.”
Like most chatbot-powered health care services, it dispenses advice but stops short of claiming to replace the expertise of a human doctor. Doctronic instead offers to connect users to an in-house team of licensed doctors or create reports that a patient can take to their physician.
In Utah, Doctronic found regulators willing to let AI go further.
The Beehive State established its Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy in 2024 and has been vocal about welcoming companies to test applications of AI with state oversight. Utah has companies sign “regulatory mitigation agreements” that temporarily exempt them from certain laws and penalties.
Doctronic’s year-long agreement permits its AI to renew existing prescriptions for a formulary of about 200 commonly prescribed drugs. When conversing with Doctronic, the company’s chatbot verifies a patient’s identity and the prescribed medicine and dosage, and asks patients if they’re experiencing side effects or worsened symptoms. A $4 fee is charged to cover the cost of verifying a patient’s ID and retrieving medical records, according to Doctronic.
“A doctor is going to ask you the same questions that the AI does,” said Adam Oskowitz, Doctronic’s other co-founder. “So it’ll feel the same. … And then at the end, instead of having to wait for the doctor to write the prescription and send it over, it’s just automatically sent to the pharmacist.”
Nirav R. Shah, a senior scholar at Stanford University’s School of Medicine who served as the commissioner of the New York State Department of Health from 2011 to 2014, said he saw Doctronic and Utah’s prescription renewal trial as a low-risk way to introduce AI into an area of need in health care.
“If you’re in a rural area where you have to take a half day off from work to travel, where the co-pay [for a doctor’s visit] is often more than the medication itself … those are examples where there are large disparities in terms of access to even prescription medication refills,” Shah said.
Concerns about using AI to provide sensitive information like health care advice often center on the tendency of chatbots to “hallucinate” falsehoods or encourage a user to act on bad information, sometimes with dangerous results. That has not stopped chatbots from becoming a go-to health care resource. More than 40 million people around the world use ChatGPT daily for health information, Axios reported.
(The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.)
Oskowitz and Pavelle said the Utah pilot program’s tight parameters and Doctronic’s internal safeguards make it less likely its AI will hallucinate or make a dangerous mistake.
“There’s no world in which a person comes to the Doctronic Utah system and says, ‘Hey, I need a new prescription, I don’t have one yet. Can you give me this?’” Pavelle said. “It simply won’t function.”
Patients and pharmacists have the option to request a human doctor to review a Doctronic prescription decision, Oskowitz said. Physicians will also review Doctronic’s first 250 renewal decisions before they are submitted to a pharmacy, according to the company’s agreement with the state.
Doctronic also will submit a monthly report to Utah’s AI policy office disclosing the number of prescription renewals accepted and denied, a random sampling of prescription applications and other data to assess the AI’s effectiveness, according to the agreement.
Busse, of the Utah Department of Commerce, touted Doctronic’s pilot as a model for the state’s attempt to balance regulating AI and encouraging innovation. Utah’s legislature has passed laws regulating mental health chatbots, how AI handles consumer financial and biometric data, and deepfakes. At the same time, the state has welcomed AI companies looking to push into licensed fields.
“It’s not just the Wild West,” Busse said. “There’s some protections in there, but also pathways for innovation.”
Besides Doctronic, Utah has year-long “regulatory mitigation agreements” with Dentacor, which runs an AI-assisted radiograph diagnostic tool that can diagnose certain dental conditions; and ElizaChat, an AI mental health platform being tested in Utah schools.
Shah, the former New York health regulator, is supportive of the approach.
“I believe that it is our job as regulators to allow innovation to happen in a safe and effective way,” he said. “ … Were I in New York at the time and with such an opportunity, I would have proceeded [with Doctronic] as well.”
If Doctronic’s pilot is successful, the data from it could help Utah lawmakers craft future legislation on AI’s role in health care, according to Busse.
Doctronic’s Oskowitz and Pavelle said they hope to secure agreements with other states. Texas last year enacted AI legislation that establishes a regulatory sandbox program similar to Utah’s that could allow Doctronic to perform a similar trial there.
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