This is a preview of the October 8 edition of Access Health—Tap here to get this newsletter delivered straight to your inbox every Thursday. Utah captured the nation's attention this week as it took another major step toward allowing artificial intelligence to perform clinical tasks traditionally reserved for licensed medical professionals. On Monday, the state announced an expansion of its AI regulatory sandbox, introducing five new agreements and a network of independent evaluators tasked with assessing the safety and effectiveness of participating technologies.
Among the new pilots is one from Nolla Health that could eventually allow AI to prescribe certain acne treatments without physician approval. Another, from August AI, will explore automated prescription refills for chronic disease medications, with physician authorization required. Intermountain Health and University of Utah Health also received agreements to expedite reviews of future AI pilots.
The state hopes the resulting evidence will inform permanent regulations and potentially guide other states. This week, I spoke with Dr. Brian Anderson, CEO of the Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), and Brenton Hill, the organization's general counsel.
CHAI is one of six independent evaluators partnering with Utah. Anderson sees the initiative as an opportunity to generate evidence that voluntary industry standards alone cannot provide. "I think some of the most urgent questions are centered around [whether] can these models be trusted," he said.
Hill emphasized that the sandbox isn't intended to give developers free rein. Instead, regulators can evaluate new applications individually before deciding whether broader adoption is appropriate. "We're not going to go roll these out all at once.
We're going to test them one by one to make sure that they're safe and effective," he said, describing the state's approach. The implications extend beyond Utah, particularly as other states consider similar regulatory frameworks. And Utah's experiment is just one piece of a much larger debate over how AI should be governed.
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