AI Prescription Renewal is Untested, Dangerous
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Utah should suspend its AI-enabled prescription renewal systems pending further review of their legality, safety, accountability and compliance with existing standards governing the practice of medicine, Public Citizen said today in a letter to the Utah Department of Commerce. Furthermore, the department should exercise heightened vigilance before expanding the use of AI systems in clinical decision-making, particularly when AI tools can influence prescription renewals, diagnosis, treatment recommendations, triage, and other functions traditionally reserved for licensed medical professionals.
“Prescription renewal is not an administrative exercise that can safely be treated as low risk for automation,” the letter reads. “Prescription renewals often require individualized judgment regarding whether a patient’s clinical condition has changed, laboratory work is overdue, adverse side effects have emerged, interactions with newly added medications exist or continued prescribing remains medically appropriate under evolving circumstances. Scholars reviewing Utah’s prescription-renewal pilot have emphasized that meaningful therapeutic monitoring, dose adjustment and clinical reassessment remain core medical functions better suited to licensed professionals than to software systems operating under generalized assumptions.”
“Deploying AI to perform core medical functions before adequate safeguards, accountability measures, and evidence of their effectiveness are in place is both dangerous and reckless,” said Dr. Robert Steinbrook, Health Research Group director for Public Citizen and an author of the letter. “AI should not be autonomously refilling prescriptions. AI is a software application, not a licensed physician or other medical professional.”
Public Citizen’s letter endorses a similar set of recommendations issued by the Utah Medical Licensing Board on April 20, calling for the suspension of AI-enabled prescription renewal systems pending further review of their legality, safety, accountability, and compliance with existing medical standards. Allowing technology officials or AI developers to override medical boards on matters of clinical practice risks eroding longstanding safeguards designed to protect patients from unsafe or insufficiently tested interventions. That responsibility is especially important now, before autonomous clinical systems become normalized through premature deployment and experimentation, Public Citizen maintains.