Illinois Appeals Court: Disability Tolled Malpractice Statutes of Limitation, Repose

October 6, 2026 by matray

An Illinois appellate court upheld a multimillion-dollar medical malpractice verdict, ruling that a patient’s catastrophic stroke and resulting legal disability tolled both the state’s two-year statute of limitations and four-year statute of repose. The court rejected the argument that the ability of the patient’s wife to sue on his behalf ended the tolling, finding that a representative’s ability to act does not remove the patient’s disability or start the statutory periods. 

Case: Chicago Trust Co. v. Cherukuri, No. 2021 L 007988, 09/18/2026, published.    

Facts: In February 2016, 64-year-old Craig Pierce was admitted to Saint Francis Hospital with pneumonia and sepsis. While hospitalized, he suffered an acute kidney injury. Doctors placed a catheter for short-term dialysis treatment.  

Pierce was also diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and prescribed a blood thinner, Coumadin, to prevent a stroke.  

After being discharged, Pierce continued dialysis at a facility operated by Fresenius Medical Care of Illinois LLC. When he finished dialysis treatment a few weeks later, Dr. Sudha Cherukuri,   

Fresenius’s medical director, referred him to the Renal Intervention Center to have the catheter removed.  

A few days before the procedure, an RIC employee called Pierce’s wife and said Pierce should stop taking Coumadin, which he did.  

Pierce then suffered a cerebral artery stroke. He was airlifted to an OSF Healthcare System hospital, where surgeons removed part of his skull to save his life.  

The stroke was catastrophic, causing extensive damage to Pierce’s brain and cognitive abilities.  

Procedural history: In 2020, Pierce’s wife filed a medical malpractice suit against Cherukuri, Fresenius, RIC, OSF, and others.  

OSF moved to dismiss based on the two-year statute of limitations and four-year statute of repose for medical malpractice claims.  

A trial judge denied the motion, ruling that the disability exception tolled the statutes of limitations and repose.  

A week after the probate court appointed the Chicago Trust Co. as temporary guardian of Pierce’s estate, it filed an amended complaint on Pierce’s behalf.  

In December 2023, the probate court deemed Pierce “a disabled person” and appointed his wife as the plenary guardian of his person and Chicago Trust as the plenary guardian of Pierce’s estate.  

After discovery and weeks before trial, OSF filed affirmative defenses again asserting the statutes of limitations and repose. The trial judge struck the affirmative defenses without stating its reasons.  

After a three-week trial, the jury returned a verdict for the Pierces against all defendants except Renal Intervention Center, which was found not liable. The jury awarded over $35 million to Pierce and $6 million to his wife.   

The judge granted an $11.5 million setoff against the award and added prejudgment interest on the full amount of the verdict before applying the setoff.  

Analysis: The Illinois Appellate Court said that a medical negligence action generally has to be filed within two years after the plaintiff knew or reasonably should have known of the injury and its wrongful cause and, in all events, within four years after the act or omission giving rise to the claim.  

Legal disability tolls both the two-year limitations period and the four-year repose period, the court said.  

Here, OSF did not deny that Pierce had a legal disability after his stroke, but it argued neither limitations nor repose should be tolled because his wife had the ability to act on Pierce’s behalf.   

“A representative may sue on behalf of a disabled person, but the representative’s ability to sue neither removes the disability nor starts the statutory periods,” the court said. “Otherwise, the protection afforded a disabled person would depend on someone else’s diligence.”  

The court went on to uphold the judge’s calculation of prejudgment interest as well as the jury’s $4 million award for emotional distress and $4 million award for pain and suffering.  

While emotional distress is a component of “suffering,” the court said the equal amounts of the awards, standing alone, did not show that the jury compensated the same injury twice. 

Disposition: Affirmed.   

To read the court’s decision, click here. 

Utah Expands AI Healthcare Experiment Beyond Prescription Renewals

October 6, 2026 by matray

Utah regulators are expanding a groundbreaking experiment that permits artificial intelligence to perform clinical functions traditionally reserved for licensed healthcare professionals, moving beyond prescription renewals into new prescriptions and treatment planning while building a broader regulatory framework for the technology.

The latest approvals show that Utah’s first AI prescription-renewal experiment with Doctronic was not a one-off. The state is now applying variations of the model to additional companies and clinical settings, including chronic-disease prescription renewals, acne treatment and pelvic-floor physical therapy.

Among the newest participants is August AI, which has been approved by the Utah Department of Commerce’s Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy to test AI-authorized prescription renewals for adults with chronic conditions.

The pilot initially requires intensive human review but could eventually allow August’s AI to authorize qualifying prescription refills while licensed providers review only a sample of its decisions.

The August program builds on Utah’s earlier Doctronic prescription-renewal pilot (see MLM, February 2026), the first state-authorized program to test AI-assisted prescription renewals through Utah’s regulatory sandbox.

Doctronic uses AI to process renewals for previously prescribed medications. Its program attracted national attention because it established a pathway under which AI could eventually authorize qualifying prescription renewals without prospective physician approval of every decision.

The Doctronic program drew objections from the Utah Medical Licensing Board, which warned against treating prescription renewals as simple administrative transactions, arguing that physicians use refill requests to reassess patients, monitor medications and identify changes in their conditions.

The newly approved August pilot applies a similar concept through a defined, stage-gated review process. Under the program, the AI can authorize routine 30-, 60- and 90-day refills of maintenance medications that adult Utah patients are already taking under established treatment plans. The program is limited to a predetermined list of noncontrolled medications and cannot be used to initiate a prescription, change a dosage or substitute one medication for another.

A Utah-licensed provider must prospectively review the first 250 refills before they reach patients. Providers will retrospectively review each of the next 1,000. Advancement requires written approval from the Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy.

If August meets the state’s performance requirements and is permitted to advance, providers would eventually spot-check at least 5% of refills in each medication class rather than individually reviewing every renewal. The demonstration period has not yet begun.

Utah regulators granted August limited regulatory relief to conduct that experiment. The state’s Division of Professional Licensing agreed not to pursue certain enforcement actions for unlicensed or unprofessional conduct or under state telehealth requirements when the AI authorizes qualifying refills in accordance with the approved protocol.

The pilot also includes safeguards designed to limit the AI’s autonomy. According to the Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy, August must verify a patient’s identity and pharmacy record before issuing a refill. Initially, patients may receive no more than three consecutive AI-authorized refills of a medication before seeing a human provider. Signs of suicidal thinking, new side effects, potentially dangerous drug interactions or missing laboratory monitoring automatically stop the AI refill process and send the case to a licensed provider.

The program also carries provisions with direct medical liability implications. Companies participating in Utah’s healthcare AI pilots must maintain medical professional liability insurance coverage, disclose the use of AI to patients and comply with adverse-event reporting requirements. Utah’s agreements do not eliminate companies’ liability for patient harm, and regulatory relief is narrowly limited to the activities authorized by each pilot.

The latest approvals also extend Utah’s regulatory model beyond the prescription renewals first tested with Doctronic.

A potentially more consequential pilot involving Nolla Health will test AI prescribing of topical acne medications. Unlike August and Doctronic, which deal with medications previously prescribed as part of an established treatment plan, Nolla’s system can assess qualifying adult patients and issue an initial prescription for certain topical acne treatments.

The Nolla program will also proceed in stages. Two Utah-licensed physicians will review every prescription before it is sent during the first stage. Later stages can move to retrospective review and eventually sampling, but each advancement requires written approval from the Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy. The Nolla demonstration period also has not yet begun.

Another approved program, Expect Fitness, moves the model beyond prescribing altogether by testing AI-generated pelvic-floor physical therapy plans for adult women. A licensed physical therapist initially must approve every plan, but the pilot could eventually allow lower-risk plans to reach patients subject to provider spot checks.

Taken together, the programs demonstrate a common model emerging in Utah: AI systems begin with comprehensive human oversight and can receive progressively greater clinical autonomy after generating performance data and receiving additional state approval.

As the number and scope of the pilots grow, Utah is adding another layer of oversight through an independent third-party evaluation network designed to verify claims made by participating companies.

Six outside organizations have entered agreements with the Office of Artificial Intelligence Policy to provide various forms of clinical or technical evaluation, evaluator-network services or independent verification that required safety checks occurred.

Evaluators can test systems for clinical errors and unsafe behavior before a pilot begins, review privacy safeguards and audit samples of actual AI activity after deployment. They can also compare companies’ performance reports against the underlying activity.

As Utah’s experiments progress from AI-assisted decisions toward potentially AI-authorized clinical care, their results could help answer questions extending well beyond the state: when AI can safely assume a clinical function, how much human oversight is necessary and who bears liability when an AI-assisted or AI-authorized healthcare decision causes patient harm.