Artificial intelligence will see you now.
Patients usually have to wait weeks and pay huge co-pays (if they have insurance) to get their prescriptions renewed, but starting next month, the process will be faster and cheaper thanks to AI.
Legion Health, a Y Combinator-backed company that has raised $7 million since launching in 2021, will be the world’s first mental health program with authorization to allow AI to prescribe psychiatric medications. Initially, only patients in Utah can use the feature, which requires a subscription fee of $20 per month, but it plans to expand to other states soon.
“The long-term goal is to build an ‘AI doctor’ not as a black box that does everything, but as an AI + doctor + clinic in the loop that can handle specific clinical tasks safely, transparently, and at scale,” Arthur MacWaters, 29, who founded Legion with Yash Patel, 30, and Daniel Wilson, 30, told NYNEXT. “Large AI doctor’s thesis has the potential to be one of the most valuable sectors on the planet.”
The scope of the program is deliberately narrow for now. AI can only renew what Legion deems “low-risk psychiatric maintenance medications” – such as SSRIs, Wellbutrin, trazodone, and mirtazapine – that human doctors have previously prescribed.
Patients explicitly opt into the AI system, which can be accessed through an app or web browser, and are clearly told that they are talking to an AI agent. After obtaining consent and verifying the patient’s identity, the AI conducts a two-minute focused safety review that includes drug interactions, side effects, and psychiatric warning signs.
Any red flag triggers immediate human takeover and patients can request a human review at any point.
“The biggest risk is that they have to pay $300 out of pocket, drive two hours, and sit in an office for whoever is going to schedule them out for two weeks to two months,” Wilson said.
In Utah, all 29 counties are designated as health professional shortage areas – indicating severe shortages in medical care. That means residents often can’t get basic prescription renewals without long waits and expensive visits.
“We truly believe that there are not enough human doctors on the planet to take care of all the health care needs that exist,” MacWaters said. “AI is fundamentally critical.”
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The pilot will follow a careful launch: the first 250 prescriptions will require a doctor’s supervision, the next 1,000 will receive a post-evaluation review by a doctor, and only after that the AI will operate independently.
Other companies have tried to disrupt healthcare with varying degrees of success — from the Theranos blood test scam to Amazon’s failed Haven experiment to more successful ventures like Teladoc.
Doctronic, which was given the green light by Utah to prescribe better prescriptions like birth control has proven to be troubled. Some researchers in the test may have cheated on oxycontin prescriptions and spread vaccine misinformation, according to a report earlier this month.
Still, traditional healthcare is full of human error – doctors juggling 30 patients a day and working with software that MacWaters described as feeling “like it came from the movie Terminator … this Windows 1994 crazy stuff.”
AI is not tired, does not forget patient history, and can review every page of someone’s medical record in a few seconds to catch drug interactions that overwhelmed human doctors can miss.
Utah has positioned itself as a national leader in AI policy, creating a regulatory sandbox that allows companies to temporarily bypass regulations to test new technologies. Unlike other states that either ban AI or embrace it wholesale, Utah has chosen what officials call a “middle ground” approach.
“We really want to forge our own way,” Margaret Woolley Bussee, Executive Director of the Utah Department of Commerce, said. “We don’t want to be AI doom or AI boomer.”
Meanwhile, states like New York are more on the “doom” end of the spectrum, with proposed legislation that would ban AI systems like ChatGPT from answering health-related questions — even basic questions about drug interactions or symptoms. The contrasting approaches highlight a growing divide between countries that see AI as a solution to healthcare access problems and those that consider it too risky to be allowed in a medical context.
In a few years, crossing country lines could mean entering a completely different world of health — one where AI is your medical assistant or banned entirely. The technology may advance at a rapid pace, but politics will determine who will use it.
Regardless, Macwaters believes that AI in healthcare is here to stay. “Every patient will have AI working on their behalf in five years.”
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