Why invest time learning pharmacy AI?
The applications of AI in pharmacy aren’t as scary as you may think…
Why am I spending so much time researching AI and its impact on the practice of pharmacy?
Technology has always interested me. With AI taking a front row seat in our world, it’s time to pay attention and sharpen our AI IQ. The potential of AI is immense, and how it’s impacting the world of pharmacy—and healthcare in general—is hugely evident. My appetite for understanding it, leaning into it, and helping others embrace its possibility grows daily.
Dario Amodei, PhD, is the CEO of Anthropic, one of a small handful of frontier AI model developers. He holds a Ph.D. in biophysics from Princeton University and completed his postdoctoral research at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. He also served as the Vice President of Research at OpenAI. He has raised over $14 billion in capital and is currently looking to raise an additional $2 billion at a valuation of $60 billion. Dario knows the immense potential of AI.
Dario Amodei wrote a widely-read essay Machines of Loving Grace in October 2024. The essay contains 14,000+ words and covers his predictions on the impact of AI on a myriad of topics: biology, neuroscience, economic development, governance, and the future of work and meaning in an AI-accelerated world. In it, he states, “…most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.” Let us, for a moment, focus on the upside.
He forecasts that by 2026, we will have AI agents that are as smart as Nobel Prize winners in most fields.
How should the pharmacy profession consider this?
Imagine a world where every prescription received by a pharmacy is already cleared for dispensing because the prior authorization has already been resolved in a few keystrokes at the point of prescribing.
Imagine a world where the optimal financial assistance package is presented to the pharmacy immediately upon adjudication and ready for communication to the patient.
Imagine a world where the patient does not have to ask the dreaded WISMO (where is my order?) question because they receive real-time updates on the dispensing process. In fact, it will happen so fast, the patient does not even need to ask.
This is not wide-eyed, optimistic thinking. A very large portion of today’s pharmacy operations—from benefit verification through drug utilization review and on to final adjudication and patient payment—is comprised of a series of questions existing in one application needing answers that exist in a different application. Today, highly trained pharmacists and technicians move that data from point A to point B. However, they are quickly moving to deploy AI to automate many of those processes.
Visit your typical community pharmacy and you will see two primary activities occurring “behind the counter”: one will be technicians selecting bottles from the shelves and preparing them to be labeled and placed in bags for delivery at checkout. The other will be pharmacist(s) and technician(s) working intently at a workstation for most of their shifts. What are they looking at? They are moving data to answer questions so that a prescription can proceed through the dispensing process.
The questions that the pharmacy staff are trying to answer are not essay questions—they are fill-in-the-blank questions with defined answers that exist as data points in hundreds of associated applications accessible by the pharmacy. Pharmacists and technicians are simply looking for the data points that answer the questions in front of them.
If AI can solve questions around large-scale problems like protein folding*, AI can solve prior authorization questions.
Today, we place a high value on individuals who can quickly “find the data” and move it to the correct application. AI agents are quickly learning these basic tasks for many industries. Pharmacy will be no different.
It’s obvious that the first wave of AI implementations will generate significant productivity gains. How pharmacy business leaders measure and advance those gains will determine the long-term health and growth of the profession.
AI and its impacts will not be isolated to one aspect of the practice of pharmacy. It will pervade every step of the prescription dispensing and patient management process. As such, we should understand the power of this technology—and the good news is it’s much easier than you might think.
Three easy steps to begin your journey to increase your AI IQ:
Learn to form internet searches into queries for tools like ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude or my personal favorite, Perplexity.
Find a reliable source for news on the general pace of advancement in AI technology and business. My favorite podcast is The AI Daily Brief.
Ask your friends and colleagues how they are using AI. You may find that more people are using AI tools than you realize, they’re just not talking about it.
We need to use AI more in our daily lives—professionally and personally—and talk about it more. As you raise your overall AI IQ, your comfort level for effectively deploying it will rise proportionately.
*Two researchers won a Nobel Prize recently using AI to do this. Click to read more.
