Will AI replace pharmacists and technicians?
It’s a question that has sparked both curiosity and concern across the healthcare landscape, and understandably so, as artificial intelligence (AI) has already had a significant impact in healthcare, including the field of specialty pharmacy. Leading organizations like the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) and the American Medical Association (AMA) have weighed in on the role of AI in clinical care, emphasizing that these technologies are tools to augment healthcare professionals, not replace them.In pharmacy practice, this means AI can enhance pharmacists’ and technicians’ capabilities by handling specific tasks and providing data-driven insights, while pharmacy professionals continue to play an irreplaceable role in patient care.
This article explores artificial intelligence in pharmacy: how it serves as a complement to specialty pharmacy professionals, not a substitute, and how the pharmacist’s role is evolving in an AI-enabled healthcare environment.
Innovations in Pharmacy and the Evolving Role of Pharmacy Professionals
Pharmacy practice has undergone a profound transformation in recent years. According to the ASHP 2024 National Survey, 74% of hospitals now have a pharmacist assigned to most patients for a minimum of eight hours per day, five days a week or more — a significant increase from 38% in 2012. This shift reflects the growing importance of pharmacists within care teams and the expanding role they play in patient care.
Beyond dispensing medications and providing drug information, pharmacists have increasingly stepped into essential clinical roles — including supporting the management of chronic conditions, providing immunizations, conducting medication therapy management, and participating on collaborative care teams.
Research has shown that pharmacists now spend more time with patients than physicians in certain care settings. For example, a recent study found that Medicare beneficiaries in all 50 states visit their community pharmacy more often (13 times per year, on average) than their primary care physician (9 times per year, on average). This frequency makes pharmacists essential, accessible touchpoints for health guidance, medication management, and early intervention opportunities.
At Shields, our integrated specialty pharmacy care model — embedded within health systems — enables hospital-owned specialty pharmacies to deliver more coordinated, patient-centered care. By bringing pharmacists closer to the point of care, this model supports real-time collaboration with prescribers, streamlined access to medications, and faster interventions. In fact, we’ve seen this approach lead to a 92% medication adherence rate and reduce time-to-therapy to an average of 2 days.
And while this evolution has been underway for years, AI is accelerating it with new innovations in pharmacy built to support pharmacists and techs as they take on expanded clinical responsibilities and elevate their impact on patient care.
Artificial Intelligence in Pharmacy: Capabilities and Limitations
As AI becomes more deeply embedded into healthcare workflows, it’s essential to understand both its capabilities and limitations. While the use of AI in pharmacy holds tremendous promise, these tools are only as effective as the pharmacists who use them. AI can empower pharmacists and strengthen their impact in a multitude of areas, including clinical decision support, workflow automation, and patient adherence tools.
The Promise of AI
AI-powered clinical decision support tools can help pharmacists ingest and analyze large volumes of patient data to identify drug interactions, suggest therapy alternatives, and flag potential safety concerns. Similarly, AI-driven workflow automation has the promise to streamline administrative processes like prior authorizations, financial assistance coordination, and therapy optimization. Additionally, using predictive analytics and machine learning, AI can be leveraged to help patients stay on track with their medication regimens by flagging patients at risk for non-adherence. All of these opportunities offer pharmacists more time to focus on higher-value patient care activities, such as hands-on clinical services and collaborative care.
Limitations of AI
With the promise of increased efficiency and automation comes the risk of missed nuance and loss of human intuition. For that reason, these solutions must be used only to enhance pharmacists’ ability to make informed decisions while continuing to incorporate human oversight to interpret AI recommendations within the context of an individual patient’s needs. As specialty pharmacists spend more time focusing on direct patient care and provider collaboration, they must remain vigilant to catch anomalies or errors that may arise from automated processes. The human touch must remain a constant for building trust and providing optimal patient care.
Related Read: Addressing GLP-1 Access and Adherence Challenges with Specialty Pharmacy Solutions
3 Ways AI Empowers Pharmacy Professionals
The true power of AI lies in empowering pharmacists and techs, not replacing them. Let’s explore three ways artificial intelligence in pharmacy is helping specialty pharmacies amplify their impact on patient care through Elena, a fictional 37-year-old woman navigating the challenges of metastatic breast cancer. Her story helps illustrate how AI can be a powerful sidekick to pharmacists, not a replacement.
Elena is a single mother who was recently laid off. She was already juggling two part-time jobs and a mountain of medical bills. When her oncologist prescribed a specialty therapy, the cost was staggering, and the paperwork to access it felt like a second diagnosis.
Sitting in her car outside the pharmacy, hands shaking, Elena obsessed over the prescription she couldn’t afford to fill. That’s when she got a call from Marcus, the clinical pharmacist embedded in her hospital’s specialty pharmacy.
1. Augments Clinical Decision-Making
Artificial intelligence, in the form of decision support tools, can augment clinical judgment, serving to supercharge the extant expertise of the clinical pharmacy team. Advanced analytics can provide pharmacists with data-driven insights — for instance, highlighting patterns in patient outcomes or suggesting evidence-based alternatives — which the pharmacist can use to make more informed therapeutic decisions.
For example, it was an AI system that alerted Marcus and his team that Elena was a patient likely in need of support for both financial risk and emotional distress. The algorithms in the AI support picked up on missed appointments, delayed refills, and a recent ER visit. But it wasn’t the AI that made the difference; it was Marcus.
Marcus’ warmth, expertise, and genuine care came through clearly when he reached out to Elena. With a friendly, reassuring tone, he began, “I saw your name come up and just wanted to check in. How are you holding up?”
In practice, the pharmacist remains the expert (autonomous from AI) who interprets machine outputs and applies them to individual patient care plans. This can lead to more precise, efficient, and cost-effective medication management, as pharmacists leverage AI’s analytical power alongside their clinical training. Human-in-the-loop systems remain critical for navigating the gray areas in medicine, and AI can serve as a helpful partner in this journey.
2. Unlocks More Time for Direct Patient Engagement
By offloading routine and time-consuming tasks, AI allows pharmacists to practice at the top of their license, concentrating on high-value patient care activities. Automation in dispensing and inventory reduces the time pharmacy professionals spend on mechanical checks and paperwork. Algorithms that flag missed appointments, ER visits, and other high-risk markers (like the one that alerted Marcus to Elena’s case) save the clinical team time while improving their ability to identify risk factors. As a result, pharmacists can dedicate more time to direct patient interactions, such as performing comprehensive medication reviews, clinical interventions, providing one-on-one counseling, and following up on patient progress.
AI essentially acts as a productivity booster, handling the background tasks so pharmacists can be more present with patients. For example, an AI system might prepare a draft of a patient’s medication reconciliation, automate inventory management, or monitor patient adherence and send reminders. Allowing the pharmacist to spend their time engaging those patients rather than mining the data. This reallocation of effort improves the quality of care and strengthens the pharmacist-patient relationship, like the budding trust between Marcus and Elena.
3. Enhances Team Collaboration
AI tools can also empower professionals in the health system and hospital-owned specialty pharmacies to collaborate more effectively with physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals. By rapidly analyzing immense amounts of patient data and literature, AI allows pharmacists to bring evidence-backed recommendations to care team discussions more efficiently and accurately. For instance, an AI tool can continuously monitor a patient’s electronic health records and flag subtle patterns or trends that might indicate an emerging health issue and provide relevant literature to support recommendations. This allows the pharmacist to proactively review and suggest interventions or adjustments to the treatment plan, backed by data and insights. In an AI-enhanced practice, pharmacists become key interpreters of AI outputs, translating them into actionable clinical insights for the team.
AI is emerging as a collaborative partner — an invaluable “Digital Advisor” — that supports pharmacists. In this way, AI empowers pharmacists to deliver even more personalized and attentive care than before.
Use of AI in Pharmacy: Challenges and Considerations
While AI presents numerous opportunities to improve specialty pharmacy practice, its adoption also introduces challenges that must be thoughtfully addressed. Successfully integrating AI requires a strategic focus on education, transparency, and governance to ensure that pharmacists can use these tools responsibly and effectively. AI without expert interpretation and partnership poses a risk to the healthcare system and individual patients.
Training and Education
Pharmacists and technicians must be trained on new skills to work alongside AI technology effectively. As pharmacy roles continue to evolve, there is an increasing need to incorporate digital health, data analytics, and informatics training into pharmacy education. Organizations like ASHP emphasize that preparing the workforce to engage with AI tools is essential to maximizing their benefits in clinical settings.
Now imagine if Marcus had called Elena and, instead of opening with a warm greeting and compassionate check-in, had said, “My system alerted me that you’ve missed your recent medical appointments.” The abruptness of that approach would likely feel impersonal and off-putting to Elena. It highlights a key risk of relying on AI without proper training and education — losing the human touch that builds trust and connection.
Biases and Accuracy of AI Systems
AI algorithms are only as good as the data that powers them. Concerns around bias, incomplete data, and inaccuracies must be addressed to ensure equitable care delivery. The AMA advises healthcare professionals to critically evaluate AI outputs, understanding both their potential and limitations, to avoid perpetuating health disparities or making flawed recommendations.
Regulatory and Legal Considerations
The regulatory landscape for AI in healthcare is constantly evolving. This makes legal requirements ambiguous and compliance challenging. Issues related to patient privacy, data security, and medicolegal liability require careful attention. Pharmacists and healthcare organizations must stay informed of emerging standards and best practices for AI governance, maintaining compliance while prioritizing patient safety and ethical use of technology and any associated data.
AI solutions should be used solely to support pharmacists’ ability to make well-informed decisions, while maintaining human oversight to interpret AI recommendations based on each patient’s specific needs.
Future of Pharmacy in an AI-Enhanced Landscape
As AI solutions for pharmacies become more advanced, the role of pharmacists and techs will be to lead, specialize, and deliver even greater value in patient care. Pharmacy clinicians will be called upon to remain the human heart and brain of pharmacy care while partnering with AI to enhance the efficiency and quality of the care provided. The power that AI offers to ingest large volumes of data is insignificant if that data cannot be processed into valuable information by human medical experts on the front lines.
Evolving Clinical Focus
In the future, as AI solutions for pharmacy become further embedded in healthcare workflows, specialty pharmacists will likely transition more deeply into roles that emphasize their clinical expertise and patient-facing skills. The pharmacist’s role will be elevated as routine verification tasks become fully automated. Their focus will shift toward providing individualized care, which includes managing complex medication regimens, optimizing therapies with AI-informed pharmacogenomic insights, and serving as health coaches for patients managing chronic conditions with digital tools. With AI doing the data-crunching, pharmacists become decision-makers and educators, translating AI insights into practical treatment plans and ensuring patients understand their therapies. While AI outputs informed Marcus of Elena’s missed appointments and recent ER visit, it was Marcus who accurately interpreted this information to mean she needed support.
During their call, Elena confided in Marcus about her financial struggles and the sense of overwhelm she felt from the mountain of paperwork. Marcus assured Elena that he would be with her throughout the process of obtaining her medication. He worked with her over the phone to complete the paperwork, leveraging AI data insights to autofill most of it. Elena left their first call feeling relieved, supported, and confident in the care she would be receiving.
Maintaining the Human Element
A key component of the pharmacist’s future role will be to uphold the human connection in healthcare. No matter how advanced AI systems become, elements like effective empathy, active listening, and personal trust will remain cornerstones of effective patient care. Pharmacists will continue to be the approachable healthcare professionals that patients rely on for reassurance, guidance, and compassion.
In an AI-integrated environment, pharmacists may even find themselves advocating for patients’ needs when an algorithm’s recommendation doesn’t “feel” right for the person in front of them. Understanding a patient’s unique situation, addressing their fears or confusion, and making ethical decisions will be what differentiates and defines the pharmacist’s role, ensuring that care remains patient-centered.
Healthcare leaders should thus encourage pharmacists to develop “soft skills” in communication and effective empathy alongside technological skills, to balance high-tech with high-touch care.
The power AI offers to ingest large volumes of data is insignificant if that data cannot be processed into valuable information by human medical experts on the front lines.
Adapting and Leading with AI
Pharmacists are poised not just to adapt to AI, but to lead in its integration into healthcare. The profession acknowledges that the spread of AI in pharmacy practice is inevitable, and pharmacists have a significant opportunity to shape how these tools improve patient care and the pharmacy profession’s trajectory.
To harness this potential, pharmacists must take on leadership roles in AI adoption — for example, participating in hospital committees on clinical AI, helping select and implement pharmacy-related AI systems, or even working with developers to design AI that truly meets pharmacy workflow needs. ASHP’s guidance suggests that pharmacy leaders should proactively define the future state of pharmacy practice in an AI-pervasive environment, rather than passively accepting technology changes as they occur.
This means staying informed about emerging AI trends in specialty pharmacy — such as AI for documentation, predictive analytics using machine learning, tools for prior authorizations and financial assistance, healthcare AI policy initiatives like AHP and CHAI, and workforce applications like staffing and scheduling — while continuously updating one’s skills and ensuring new pharmacists are trained in both pharmacy science and data science. By being at the forefront of AI initiatives, pharmacists can ensure that these tools are used responsibly and effectively, aligning with the goal of better patient outcomes. Practically, we may see more pharmacists specializing in informatics or taking on titles like “Clinical Pharmacy – AI Specialist” in the years to come.
Ultimately, those pharmacists who embrace innovation and guide its implementation will help elevate the entire profession while preserving its integrity.
Conclusion
So, whatever happened to Elena? In the days that followed their phone call, Marcus worked with the AI system to fast-track her prior authorization, identify a foundation that covered her co-pay, and set up a refill reminder system tailored to her schedule. But more importantly, he called her every week, just to talk. To explain side effects. To remind her she wasn’t alone.
And that’s the power of AI in the right hands. It didn’t replace Marcus. It helped him see Elena, not just as a patient, but as a person.
The rise of AI in healthcare is not a threat to pharmacy professionals, but rather a catalyst for the evolution of their role. Both the ASHP and AMA perspectives make it clear that AI is best viewed as “augmented intelligence”: a means to enhance the pharmacist’s capabilities, not to replace the pharmacist’s presence within the care team.
Specialty pharmacy professionals bring irreplaceable value through their clinical judgment, personalized patient interactions, and advocacy for safe and effective medication use. AI technologies, when thoughtfully integrated, can shoulder administrative loads and provide analytical insights, empowering pharmacists to focus on what they do best: caring for patients.
AI will continue to reshape pharmacy practice, but it will do so with pharmacists, not instead of them. Pharmacy professionals should welcome AI as a partner and advocate for its responsible use, thereby driving an era of enhanced care delivery. The charge now is for pharmacy professionals to lead these changes, ensuring that the future of healthcare is one where advanced technology and human expertise work hand in hand to achieve the best outcomes for patients.
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