The White House is backing a push for AI to take over more of the duties of physicians, The Washington Post reported.
The Trump administration supports an experiment in Utah where AI is writing prescriptions, plans to offer over $50 million in research awards to developers of conversational AI for cardiovascular care and has created an expedited approval process for digital health products like AI chatbots. The administration is also working on a regulatory pathway for independent AI physicians, likening the process to the decades-long effort to bring self-driving cars from test tracks to public roads, according to the June 4 story.
“People are seeing the difference the AI is bringing,” Amy Gleason, the administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency who is now a healthcare AI advisor at HHS, told the news outlet. “And it’s like the genie is out of the bottle.”
But there has been political backlash at the state level, with Pennsylvania recently suing an AI company for allegedly impersonating physicians and the Utah Medical Licensing Board calling for a halt to the AI prescription pilot, the story noted.
“At some point there will be cases where we have given the AI a level of trust that it doesn’t yet deserve, and people will get hurt and probably people will be killed,” Robert Wachter, MD, chair of medicine at the University of California San Francisco, told The Post. A growing backlash is already palpable, he said.
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