Utah works to keep AI from getting 'stuck' in regulation, says Zachary Boyd, Ph.D., director of the state's Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy

If healthcare is fertile territory for artificial intelligence (AI) , then Utah may be a place where some of those AI seeds get planted and tested first.

Utah set up an Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy two years ago with an eye to developing AI policies in a “learning lab” but also lowering regulatory barriers to encourage demonstration projects in the state for new AI products.

“There is a real danger that as regulators, you’re going to get stuck because regulation tends to move slowly,” Zachary Boyd, Ph.D., director of the office, said in an interview with Managed Healthcare Executive (MHE). “We wanted a way that would be kind of balanced, where you can allow innovators to move forward without waiting years and years for the government to figure itself out while still fulfilling our duty to manage public safety concerns.

Doctronic is an AI company that on its website is billing itself as the “#1 AI doctor: to provide free, 24/7 access to personalized and practical health information.” Boyd’s office has approved a Doctronic demonstration project to use AI to process prescription renewal refills. Jared Kaltwasser, a regular contributor to MHE, wrote about Doctronic’s AI-guided prescription renewal project in a piece in the March 2026 MHE, which you can find here.

Boyd noted that Utah and other states play a major regulatory role in healthcare, partly through rules that govern healthcare professionals in a variety of ways.

“We've got our scope of practice and our professional practice laws,” Boyd said. “Doctronic has come with their proposal around prescription refills, which we think is a really interesting application. It's interesting as a public health problem. It's interesting as a way to use our healthcare workforce efficiently, which is a huge concern. And so we've authorized that pilot.”

Another application of AI in healthcare that the Utah AI policy office has approved on a pilot project basis is an AI-assisted radiographic tool for making dental diagnoses. Dentacor, a Utah company that Boyd described as doing “indigent dentistry,” is testing a protocol that will allow licensed dental hygienists to make certain diagnoses without getting a dentist involved.

“We have a hypothesis that the AI radiology tools are so good now that it makes sense for us to move some of the diagnostic and treatment plan creation work down from dentists to dental hygienists, paired with an AI radiology tool, so that if they agree, you don't have to escalate to a dentist,” Boyd said.