The doctor won’t see you now.

Utah has launched a first-in-the-nation pilot program that will allow an AI system to renew 190 commonly prescribed medications for patients with chronic conditions.

Some medications with the potential for abuse, like pain management and ADHD drugs, are excluded, according to Politico. The program will initially cost $4 per renewal but will eventually be either covered by insurance or offered at an annual fee.

Utah is undertaking the program with Doctronic, a health-tech startup that launched in 2023. Doctronic already offers AI medical tools designed to automate some of the work typically performed by physicians, including a chatbot that provides free medical consultations and generates follow-up notes for physicians as needed.

At the heart of Doctronic’s work is removing barriers to healthcare access, cutting down costs, and easing the burden on healthcare workers, and AI can certainly do that, at least to some extent. Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly used by healthcare professionals around the country, with a recent OpenAI report claiming that 46% of American nurses use them weekly. The report also claims that 7-in-10 healthcare-related conversations with AI chatbots happen outside of normal clinic hours.

Per Politico, the decisions made by Doctronic’s AI system matched those of human clinicians 99.2% of the time, and the system will be held to the same level of responsibility as a doctor would be for any claims of malpractice.

But AI is far from a perfect technology, and mistakes can prove to be fatal in healthcare contexts. The AI could fail to catch certain drug interactions or other patient red flags, leading to disastrous consequences for patients. AI systems are also prone to being gamed, including shockingly via poetry, and that can create a dangerous loophole that can be abused by patients struggling with addiction.

There is also the issue of biases. According to a recent Financial Times report, some medical AI tools tend to downplay the concerns of women and stereotype some races and ethnicities while making their diagnoses.

While Utah is so far the only state offering the AI renewals, Doctronic is reportedly in discussion to expand the practice to Texas, Arizona, and Missouri, and is weighing a path to nationwide approval.

The legality of it all is interesting. States broadly get to set their own rules on how medicine can be practiced within their borders, and an AI that independently renews prescriptions would technically be governed under that category.

But AI-enhanced medical devices fall squarely under the regulatory authority of the Food and Drug Administration, which itself is going through a reevaluation of how it regulates AI deployment in health.

Starless ‘Failed Galaxy’ Is First of Its Kind Ever Seen

By Jenna Ahart edited by Lee Billings

A potential new type of celestial object has all the makings of a normal small galaxy. It’s rich with the same hydrogen gas that births suns and planets, and it lies within a halo of dark matter, the same invisible stuff that holds galaxies together. Yet it’s missing one key component of glittering galaxies like our own Milky Way: stars.

Nicknamed Cloud-9, the gas cloud is technically the best-yet example of a RELHIC, or Reionization-Limited H I Cloud. The “H I” stands for Cloud-9’s bounty of neutral hydrogen, and “RELHIC” refers to what astronomers believe the object to be: a primordial fossil—or relic—from the universe’s early epochs that, for some reason, never managed to form stars or become a full-fledged galaxy. That makes Cloud-9 a “failed galaxy,” said Rachael Beaton, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, during a January 5 press conference at the American Astronomical Society’s 247th meeting in Phoenix, Ariz.

Based on their understanding of dark matter’s behavior and the hierarchical process of galaxy formation, astronomers have long predicted that such starless objects should exist throughout the cosmos. But until recently, RELHICs had been notoriously difficult to spot.

---

On supporting science journalism

If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

---

The results—presented by Beaton at the meeting and published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters last November—bolster the case that we’ve finally found one of these elusive phantom galaxies. Cloud-9 first burst onto the astronomy scene in 2023, when the Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope in China’s province of Guizhou discovered a nearly 5,000-light-year-wide spherical cloud of hydrogen gas about 14 million light-years from Earth that appeared to be a faint dwarf galaxy, albeit bereft of visible stars. More in-depth studies on the cloud showed that it contains about a million solar masses of hydrogen and some five billion solar masses of dark matter, but researchers couldn’t confirm it to be truly starless. Perhaps, instead, it was indeed a strange sort of dwarf galaxy that was sparsely populated with very old and dim stars.

So Beaton and her colleagues peered once again at the object through the keen gaze of the Hubble Space Telescope. And in all of Hubble’s observations, she said, it found hints of just one star within Cloud-9. It could be that other stars simply went by undetected, but based on further simulations, the team found that the cloud probably couldn’t host more than some 3,000 solar masses worth of stars—a meager smattering that would preclude the object being a dwarf galaxy. This new result not only makes Cloud-9 the foremost REHLIC candidate in astronomers’ catalogs but also a milestone for verifying the common prediction that “not every dark matter halo will have a galaxy in it,” Beaton said.

While the fresh information from Hubble “certainly eliminates the possibility that [Cloud-9] is a dwarf galaxy,” there’s still much left to learn about this peculiar object, says Kristine Spekkens, an astronomer at Queen’s University in Ontario, who was not involved with the work. For instance, she says, Cloud-9 doesn’t have quite as smooth a shape as astronomers would expect. Better mapping of its gas distribution could provide more insights into how exactly it formed and evolved over cosmic time.

Still, it will be difficult to definitively confirm that Cloud-9 is in fact a RELHIC so long as it remains in a league completely of its own, says Ethan Nadler, an astronomer at the University of California, San Diego, who didn’t take part in the Hubble observations. While dubbing the cloud officially “starless” will be challenging, finding similar objects may help researchers shed some light on this dark area of astronomy.