Dr. Adam Rodman

Well, so globally, no, we should not be having LLMs write prescriptions for people.

The trial in Utah in particular is a refill.

So a doctor has already written a prescription within the last 12 months.

And I guess the idea is that it saves the primary care doctor time from having to review and refill.

I'll tell you, if you talk to most doctors, yes, it is annoying to get refill requests.

No, that is not the thing that drives us crazy.

This is not like a use case that we're screaming for.

I think it's being done as a proof of concept of can this work in the real world.

This trial in and of itself is not dangerous.

Prescription refills, and I think there's no opiates.

There's no dangerous drugs in it.

And a doctor has to have written the original one.

But even if it does work in this, that does not mean we should be having autonomous AI systems write new prescriptions.

That is not safe, and it's not a good idea yet.

So first, aren't most of your prescription refills just done as in you call the pharmacy and they send an automated thing to your doctor and they click the yes button and you never talk to them?

So I'll do the devil's advocate back.

Let's say I prescribe a fairly common antidepressant and they wanted to be refilled.

What I don't know is that this patient may be – the silly question you get in the clinic may be new –

lesions forming in your mouth and it's an early ulcer and if we don't pick it up within 24 to 48 hours you may develop like stephen johnson syndrome so potentially life-threatening complication and the reason there are certain types of drugs including anti-hypertensives is that they can be high risk and we need follow-up now is that everything no and definitely there should be more things over the counter

I don't think that most doctors are sitting around saying, I wish I had more medication follow-up visits.