Vermont pharmacy chain pulls back AI phone assistant after it garbled drug names and produced wrong, duplicate refills
What happenedKinney Drugs, a Vermont and upstate New York pharmacy chain, deployed an AI phone and text assistant named 'Burt,' built by vendor Synerio, in May 2026 to handle prescription refills. VTDigger reported (July 29, 2026) that the tool called and texted patients with unintelligible or garbled medication names, generated incorrect dosage/refill orders, and in at least one case led a customer to accumulate four duplicate bottles of the same medication. Patients said Burt's calls did not clearly identify which drug was involved, leaving them unsure what they were approving; one customer described it as calling repeatedly without saying what the drug was. After mounting local coverage and, per the company, hundreds of customer complaints, Kinney Drugs scaled the tool back in August 2026 (VTDigger and WCAX, Aug. 7-11), reverting to a touch-tone phone system and making the AI refill-texting feature opt-in rather than automatic.
Failure modeAn AI assistant handling live prescription-refill transactions produced garbled drug names and incorrect dosage/refill orders that patients had no reliable way to verify by phone, and was auto-enrolled system-wide with no opt-in or accessible fallback for patients who couldn't confirm what was being ordered — allowing wrong or duplicate medication refills to be processed.
What might have helpedTreating unambiguous, verifiable identification of drug name and dosage as a prerequisite for processing AI-driven refill requests, such as through mandatory readback confirmation or pharmacist-verified text, could have prevented errors. Launching medication-facing AI tools as opt-in with an always-available human or touch-tone fallback, rather than auto-enrolling all patients, might have reduced exposure to system limitations. Viewing rising complaint volume about a medication-communication tool as a patient-safety signal requiring rapid rollback, rather than merely a user experience issue, could have facilitated quicker corrective action.
Tool withdrawn Since thenKinney Drugs scaled back its AI phone assistant after hundreds of complaints, reverting to a touch-tone phone system and making AI refill texts opt-in.
Still openA rollback rather than a fix; no public account of how drug names are now confirmed in the remaining AI texting feature.
LessonIn hindsight, opt-in enrolment and a non-AI fallback could have been the launch design rather than the rollback. Rising complaint volume was an early warning that was handled as a service issue rather than a safety signal.
Sources: vtdigger.org · wcax.com