The program allows patients in the state to get prescription refills for 190 common meds.
The state of Utah is allowing artificial intelligence to prescribe medication refills to patients without direct human oversight in a pilot program public advocates call “dangerous.”
The program is through the state’s “regulatory sandbox” framework, which allows businesses to trial “innovative” products or services with state regulations temporarily waived. The Utah Department of Commerce partnered with Doctronic, a telehealth startup with an AI chatbot.
Doctronic offers a nationwide service that allows patients to chat with its “AI doctor” for free, then, for $39, book a virtual appointment with a real doctor licensed in their state. But patients must go through the AI chatbot first to get an appointment.
According to a non-peer-reviewed preprint article from Doctronic, which looked at 500 telehealth cases in its service, the company claims its AI’s diagnosis matched the diagnosis made by a real clinician in 81 percent of cases. The AI’s treatment plan was “consistent” with that of a doctor’s in 99 percent of the cases.
Now, for patients in Utah, Doctronic’s chatbot can refill a prescription without a doctor, for a $4 service fee . After a patient signs in and verifies state residency, the AI chatbot can pull up the patient’s prescription history and offer a list of prescription medications eligible for a refill. According to Politico, the chatbot will only be able to renew prescriptions for 190 common medications for chronic conditions, with key exclusions, such as medications for pain and ADHD, and those that are injected.
...read more at arstechnica.com
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Was never really sure what pharmacists do in the first place. It seems like I'd just give them the doctor's orders and they'd go in the back and fetch the medicine for me.
They do a ton lol. I make a ton of stupid mistakes (drug drug interactions etc) and they catch them and educate patients. Also they have insane burnout because they have to verify an insane number of orders/hour. Sadly pharmd school because very profitable so they multiplied the number of schools and combined with private equity and consolidating mega pharmacy chains a once decent profession has had horribly stagnant (or dropping) wages for over a decade.
But yeah a good LLM can do a lot of what they and I do.
❤️
Maybe coz I'm relatively young (medically, at least) and have never had to take multiple drugs at the same time. Still, I would have thought the doctors would also take into account what other drugs you're on before prescribing anything to you. Is the pharmacist a second layer of validation, or do they have a more accurate history of your medications?
Well yeah you try but there are a lot of drugs out there and lot of complexities. We study everything and they just study meds, they are much better at the nuances of dosing, interactions, renal dosing, contraindications etc.
Your ability to catch all of these small things goes down when you are forced to see 20-40 patients a day.
Makes sense