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The U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey reports that approximately one in ten houses in West Virginia has no internet access. According to stateline.org, the issue is even more extreme in some rural areas, such as Roane County, where reliable internet is available to less than 32% of the population. On January 6th, 2026, the Utah Department of Commerce announced that Utah went live with its pilot program of offering prescription medication refills via Doctronic's artificial intelligence chatbots without physician oversight. As per U.S. News & World Report, Utah is ranked first in the nation for internet access and third for broadband subscriptions. So the question becomes: Why offer low cost, autonomous AI medical services to a state that is already rich in telemedicine resources and options? Why not offer real change and improvement to rural, underserved areas first?
I have embarked upon this project to highlight the disparity of the allocation of resources and to emphasize that, until the world miraculously changes, there still needs to be a way to reach the most vulnerable of populations today. To improve rural medicine access now, we need to create systems that are not stripped-away versions of current models, but that start over from the ground up, taking advantage of pervasive technology and building outwards. Giving basic medical access via telemedicine to rural areas lacking in reliable internet coverage is a lofty, but obtainable goal. This project was created to show that even someone with absolutely no coding or computer science background can, with the help of ChatGPT, Render, GitHub, and Twilio, create a (albeit very primitive) prototype of a telephone-only telemedicine based platform. Ideally, platforms like Doctronic.ai would create a telephone-only version of their platform that would allow access for rural populations who are most in need of peer-reviewed, easily and reliably accessible medical information and care.

This is a primitive representative prototype of a telephone only telemedicine system. The full version would ideally include autonomous artificial intelligence based on peer-reviewed only sources. This prototype is currently just eye symptom specific, but again, it would be expanded to cover typical primary and urgent care complaints in a full version. All information presented is for demonstrative purposes only and should not be viewed, in it's current iteration, as medical advice. Please seek care from your licensed medical doctor for actual eye conditions.

Disclaimer: when calling the phone number please realize that because of the unpaid version of the sites that were utilized to create this demonstrative model, the system sleeps with inactivity so the first call will say "application error." Please call again a second time, now that the system is awake, to experience the service. When testing out the system please try symptoms like blurry vision, itchy eyes, pink eye, or emergency conditions like flashes or floaters.