August AI Approved to Pilot AI-Assisted Prescription Renewals for Patients with Chronic Conditions in Utah

Stage-gated pilot in Utah's regulatory sandbox requires 1,250 physician-reviewed decisions per drug class, and costs Utah patients $4 per renewal

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--August AI, the AI health companion used by more than nine million people across 160 countries, today announced it has been approved by the Utah Department of Commerce's Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy (OAIP) to pilot AI-assisted prescription renewals for Utah patients managing chronic conditions. A Utah-licensed physician will review every renewal in the pilot before authorizing the prescription.

The agreement was announced this morning at a state press conference, alongside new pilots from other health technology providers, including the University of Utah Health, and a new network of independent third-party evaluators that will verify claims made by companies in the sandbox. The third-party evaluators include Coalition for Health AI (CHAI), Clarion AI Partners, Glacis Technologies, mpathic AI, Vega Health, and Stanford Clinical Excellence Research Center.

August AI’s pilot covers routine, non-controlled medications for chronic conditions, including the most commonly prescribed first-line treatments for diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Prescription renewals are among the most routine decisions in medicine. Most renewals continue a treatment a physician has already chosen, yet they still wait in the same queue as everything else, and patients with diabetes, high blood pressure, or heart disease can end up going days without medication they rely on.

“A renewal is one of the simplest things a doctor's office handles, and it's also where a lot of patients fall through the cracks,” said Anuruddh Mishra, founder and CEO of August AI. “Someone managing diabetes or high blood pressure shouldn't have their care put on hold because a routine request is sitting in a queue. The future of longevity has to work for people taking ordinary medicines, and that starts with making sure they don't run out of them. In this pilot, the AI prepares the renewal and a Utah-licensed physician reviews and authorizes it, with the state overseeing every step. It's the same standard we hold everywhere at August: physicians make the clinical decisions.”

How the pilot works

The AI reviews each renewal request and makes a recommendation. A Utah-licensed physician reviews that recommendation before any prescription is authorized, so a physician makes the final decision on every renewal.

The pilot is stage-gated by drug class, and August must meet performance requirements at each stage before it can move to the next. The pilot also includes the safeguards required of every participant in Utah's sandbox. Patients are told when AI is involved in their care. August carries specialty medical malpractice insurance and operates under a 24-hour incident response plan, and patients keep their traditional legal remedies. Prescriptions are issued under the licenses of August's Utah-licensed physicians.

August AI's underlying models score 100 percent on the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination, the exam every licensed U.S. physician must pass. August also leads competing AI models on MedQA and the medical subsets of MMLU, two benchmarks that test multi-step clinical reasoning.

Pricing and availability

August is offering renewals through the pilot for $4 each, so cost shouldn't be the reason someone with a chronic condition lets a prescription lapse. That's a fraction of the cost of a typical doctor's visit: self-pay primary care visits average $171 in major U.S. cities, and telehealth visits usually cost $40 to $90, according to Zocdoc. The program also runs at cost, and that choice is deliberate. The AI's job is to make the right call on every request, and sometimes the right call is to decline a renewal and send the patient back to their doctor. Because August makes no profit on any renewal, it earns nothing more when the AI approves than when it declines, so patients, physicians and regulators can feel confident in the pilot’s safety and accuracy.

About August AI

August AI is a health AI that stays with a patient over time. Available at any hour in more than 30 languages, it answers medical questions, interprets labs and prescriptions, and carries a patient's conditions, medications, and prior results forward so that new information is read in the context of the whole patient. In the United States, the company offers August Care to consumers, a $29-a-month membership that brings doctors, labs, prescriptions, and insurance assistance together, creating one continuous health experience for patients.

Founded in 2022 by Anuruddh Mishra, August has grown to nine million users across 160 countries with almost no advertising, producing one of the largest bodies of patient conversation data in health AI. The company evaluates its system on real patient conversations as well as standardized medical exams, and the platform is HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2-compliant, and LegitScript-certified. The company is backed by Accel.

More information is available at https://meetaugust.ai