Photo: Harry Travis with NABP Board Chair, Jeff Mesaros at NABP 2025.

Navigating Pharmacy’s Future from Full Practice Authority to the Transformative Power of AI Integrations

As the healthcare and pharmacy industries continue to evolve, staying informed on the latest regulatory developments and innovations is essential for anyone involved in the profession. Whether you're a seasoned professional or someone with a keen interest in pharmacy’s future, understanding how the landscape is shifting can help guide your next steps.

In this issue, we dive into the highlights from three major industry conferences, primarily AMCP, Asembia, and most recently, NABP. These gatherings addressed critical topics, from the security of our drug supply to the integration of artificial intelligence in healthcare. One key takeaway across all three meetings is the growing momentum around Full Practice Authority (FPA) for state boards of pharmacy. This framework could play a pivotal role in expanding the practice of pharmacy and ensuring that pharmacists are better utilized in the healthcare system.

However, one area of concern raised at these meetings is the potential of AI to drive productivity gains across pharmacy teams. While AI promises efficiency, the challenge remains in ensuring that these gains are translated into meaningful improvements in patient care, particularly in expanding access to primary care services provided by pharmacists.

Looking ahead, we predict that the NABP and its Innovation Institute will be a crucial resource for state boards across the country. As technology, including AI, advances at a rapid pace, the need for centralized research and analysis becomes increasingly important. No individual board can manage this alone, and the NABP is poised to provide the support necessary to help boards navigate these complex issues effectively.

Read this issue’s article to explore the vital work being done by the NABP and its member boards to address these challenges and more, and how these efforts will shape the future of pharmacy practice.

Cheers,
Harry

Photo: Express Scripts’ Rich Palombo, Harry Travis and Hazel Health’s Jeff Sinko

Reunions and re-friending

Hanging out with the RxRoundtable Members and friends at NABP.

AI Head to Head: ChatGPT vs Grok

AI assisted with this article. Imagine that. An article on AI assisted by AI. 🤖

ChatGPT vs. Grok: Which AI sidekick wins for specialty pharmacy leaders?

AI is here and executives in specialty pharmacy, PBM, and pharma-to-market are asking: Which tool can actually help me organize my thoughts faster and foster smarter decisions?

We put two leading contenders to the test, ChatGPT (from OpenAI) and Grok (from Elon Musk’s xAI), to see which is more helpful for a specialty pharmacy executive or consultant juggling market dynamics, team strategy, and client work.

The comparison challenge:

We evaluated both tools in four common specialty pharmacy use cases:

• Brainstorming around value-based contracting models

• Solving a pipeline bottleneck in HEOR team workflows

• Conducting directional market research on 505(b)(2) product trends

• Reframing a complex regulatory update into client-friendly messaging

How they stack up

1. Brainstorming and Strategy Thinking

• ChatGPT: Offers structured thought-partner prompts, plays well with ambiguity, and helps shape frameworks quickly.

• Grok: More casual tone, tends to veer off topic or default to snarkiness which may not appeal to a corporate leader. Feels less tuned to executive workflows.

✅ Winner: ChatGPT for clarity, depth, and strategic scaffolding.

2. Solving Internal Challenges

• ChatGPT: Can simulate perspectives (e.g., payer, patient, regulator), identify operational blind spots, and offer system-level ideas, especially when provided detailed context, reference links, and specific prompt structure.

• Grok: Offers some lateral thinking but lacks context specificity and tends to prioritize personality over precision.

✅ Winner: ChatGPT for system-savvy insights.

3. Market and Competitor Research

• ChatGPT: Strong synthesis of known data up to late 2023. Lacks real-time information especially triggered by trend-driven topics, however, it’s organized and digestible when prompted to the readers’ needs.

• Grok: Pulls from X (formerly Twitter) which offers immediacy but risks surface-level insights and unverified claims, requiring additional research and verification.

Best practice: ChatGPT for foundation-building; Grok for pulse-checks or contrarian takes.

4. Messaging and Communication

• ChatGPT: Polished, audience-aware drafts that can be tuned by tone of author brand and reader (regulatory, investor, patient).

• Grok: Style-forward, yet lacks polish for professional communications.

✅ Winner: ChatGPT, especially for clear, high-stakes messaging backed by verified data.

Final verdict: For specialty pharmacy leaders, ChatGPT is the AI platform most likely to deliver useful, clear, and strategic results.

An additional note about Grok:

Grok’s DeepSearch mode taps into live X data and web sources, making it a go-to for tracking real-time trends, such as shifts in PBM policies or patient sentiment on specialty drugs. This speed (responses in ~90 seconds) suits executives needing quick market pulses. ChatGPT’s Deep Research, while thorough, takes longer (~17 minutes) and relies on a broader but less immediate dataset, better for in-depth competitor analysis or insights. Grok may offer a quirky or trendy insight that will embellish your final output, and if time affords, experiment with Grok as a complement.

Curious how others in the industry are using AI in their work? Hit reply and share your take and we might feature it in a future RxR Briefings.

Industry Conferences Summer Break

Things are winding down for the summer before we get back to a busy fall and year-end conference season. The only conference we have on our event calendar is the NACDS Total Store Expo happening August 23-25 in San Diego, CA. Click here to learn more and register.

September revs things back up with PBMI, NASP Annual, and the PCMA Annual Meeting. But the RxRoundtable Member Events are still rockin’ throughout the summer—at least three events per month plus a Member all-hands in June.

Upcoming RxRoundtable Member Events

Grab your seat for our upcoming RxRoundtable Member-only events.

• Tuesday RxRoundtable Session June 3, 2025 4-5PM EST—TailorMed’s CEO Srulik Dvorsky will provide an overview of his company’s services. TailorMed’s comprehensive technology suite allows financial assistance to be leveraged by any provider, pharmacy, or patient, anywhere a prescription is written or dispensed. TailorMed Platform is disease- and therapy-agnostic and can interface with any EMR, pharmacy or practice management system via API or data feed.

• RxRoundtable Hot Topic 🔥 June 11, 2025 4-5PM EST—This month’s Hot Topic will be a RxRoundtable Professional Member panel comprised of Nancy Hedlund, Doug Safford, and David Hummel, facilitated by Harry Travis. The discussion will focus on AI and how you can use AI to increase your IQ.

• Thursday RxRoundtable Session June 19, 2025 4-5PM EST—This month, we host Joe Marttila with TheracosBio who will share how he launched a low-cost diabetes drug.

Past Member Event Recordings

Miss an event? No worries. We have it recorded!

We know you sometimes have competing priorities and miss attending a live RxRoundtable Member event. The good news is we record every event for all Members to view at any time.

To access past event recordings, log into the RxRoundtable Member area and click on any past event to find the recording in the event detail page, or, visit the new Past Recordings in the Resource Library.

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We hope you enjoyed this issue of RxR Briefings