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Tuesday, 6 October 2026 |
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Next in AI-driven prescriptions |
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| Utah is way ahead of the rest of the country in embracing AI in healthcare. Now it’s doubling down. |
| Utah’s Office of AI Policy operates a regulatory sandbox that gives startups and other organizations flexibility to test the technology in ways that might normally run afoul of laws and regulations. On Monday, it announced a slew of new agreements. |
| The most interesting one is with General Catalyst-backed Nolla Health, which will use AI to prescribe topical acne treatments to adult patients who weren’t on the medicine before. |
| It’s a big step forward. Previously, Utah had sparked pushback when it permitted Doctronic to use AI for prescription renewals. Its latest agreements come as tech giants sound alarms about frontier models going rogue and the healthcare industry grapples with whether to slow AI innovation. |
| “In the AI space, there's a lot of uncertainty. It’s all very new. The route we decided to go was to focus on a certain specialty and really nail end-to-end care there,” Nolla co-founder and CEO Luis Wenus told Endpoints News. |
| The Nolla pilot seems pretty low risk. In the company’s app, patients verify their identity, answer intake questions about their symptoms and history, and scan their face. AI spits out a plan and prescription from a predefined list of treatments including different tretinoin formulations. The pilot excludes patients with severe acne and won’t include prescriptions for riskier treatments including oral or isotretinoin (Accutane) therapies. To get a
prescription renewed, patients must complete daily face scans to track their progress. |
| Doctors will also oversee the outputs. For the first 100 patients, a doctor will review every AI-generated prescription before it’s sent. That’s essentially how Nolla’s app has been operating across the country for more than a year, Wenus said. After the first phase, a doctor will check each prescription retroactively. Eventually, only a sample of prescriptions will be reviewed once per week. |
| There’s debate about whether the latter stages of certain Utah pilots, when there’s less immediate physician oversight, would require the FDA to sign off. Wenus doesn’t think that’s the case. |
| “The way that we are doing it is basically the practice of medicine, and the states are the ones that license doctors,” he said. |
| - Shelby |
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AI leading to job cuts |
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50% |
The percentage of healthcare organizations that have cut staff as a direct result of AI or plan to do so within six months, according to a Bessemer Venture Partners report. The cuts took out an average of 8% to 13% of affected teams. |
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This week in health Тech |
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Robin Berzin is no longer CEO at Parsley Health. Berzin, who founded the primary care company, will instead serve as board chair, chief health officer and founder. “Today Parsley is stronger than ever across every metric: growth, burn, margin, LTV, CAC, culture, and customer satisfaction and retention,” Berzin said in a LinkedIn post. “That makes this the best time to hand the reins to a wonderful incoming CEO and support the company in a new way, while creating space for new projects and greater focus on my family.” |
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Worldwide made. Thanks for reading.
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