ChatGPT Could Help Community Pharmacists Save Time
Researchers conducted a survey of community pharmacists to understand their use, concerns, and opportunities regarding ChatGPT technology in their practice setting.
ChatGPT is most valuable to community pharmacists as a writing assistant tool that could help save time and create more efficiency, according to a survey published in Exploratory Research in Clinical and Social Pharmacy.1 However, researchers determined the answers ChatGPT provided were too unreliable and suggested cross-referencing them with trustworthy resources.
“Since the widespread availability of artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of large language models (LLMs), the general public is confronted with accessible AI-tools,” wrote the authors. “AI can be used to automate repetitive tasks and help to save time in busy working environments. With the release of ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) in November 2022, openly available AI has created a paradigm shift in many working fields.”
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT reached over 200 million active users per week in the summer of 2024. | image credit: Diego / stock.adobe.com
Across the general public and in industries spanning the globe, ChatGPT is a type of technology becoming commonplace in society. In August 2024, OpenAI—the company that owns ChatGPT—announced that the platform had over 200 million active visitors per week. The company also mentioned that 92% of Fortune 500 companies were using its product.2
As an LLM, ChatGPT processes written language in a human-like form, answering to prompts and completing automated administrational tasks. With persistent burnout and workforce shortages in many community pharmacies, researchers believe ChatGPT can help pharmacists regain efficiency and enhance their overall services.1
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“Presently, many people are experimenting how these tools might be useful in their professional environment,” they continued. “There is limited knowledge on the current use, concerns, and opportunities of LLMs such as ChatGPT in pharmacy practice…The aims of this study were to explore the extent and type of use of ChatGPT in community pharmacy and to identify the concerns and opportunities for pharmacy practice.”
Researchers designed a questionnaire for community pharmacists, pharmacy assistants, and pharmacy students during a 3-week time period in the summer of 2023. After being asked about background characteristics, participants ranked ChatGPT statements from 1 to 5 defining their overall agreement with each statement. With the option to also add comments within the questionnaire, participants lastly included data describing how exactly they used ChatGPT in their practice setting.
A total of 106 individuals (50.9% women) completed the survey with 81 participants (76%) coming from the pharmacy profession and 73 identifying as community pharmacists. While only around half of participants (50.9%) used ChatGPT themselves, 97.2% were familiar with the technology. Furthermore, a total of 24 pharmacy employees used ChatGPT in their practice setting, highlighting that over 60% of them had never used it in their pharmacy.
“They experienced that ChatGPT was useful, mainly as a writing assistant, and that it could support pharmacy workers for a diversity of writing tasks,” they continued.1 “The participants had concerns regarding clinical questions with respect to reliability, accuracy, and completeness of the answers.”
Participants reported that they used ChatGPT for various tasks that involved accessing the technology as a writing assistant to create necessary pharmacy information. These tasks included writing job posts, gathering informational text about drugs and their uses, creating pharmacy documents and readable text for patients, translating educational information, and more.
Before conducting the survey, researchers initially identified barriers to ChatGPT’s implementation. Similar to these barriers, survey participants noted accuracy concerns about the technology. However, with society’s increasing dependence and use of AI like ChatGPT, experts believe the technology will improve as industries, such as health care, continue to find new ways to leverage its capabilities.
According to an article published in Exploration of Digital Health Technologies, pharmacists are already using ChatGPT for “customer support, drug interaction checks, prescription validation, drug discovery, and more.”3 As it reaches more industries and becomes more familiar to providers, pharmacies could find increasing value in ChatGPT technology as it is further developed.
“To further elucidate the possibilities and limitations of ChatGPT and other LLM in pharmacy, more research and practice experience is needed,” they concluded.1
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References
1. Janske E, Eimermann VM, Rijcken C, et al. The extent and type of use, opportunities and concerns of ChatGPT in community pharmacy: a survey of community pharmacy staff. ERCSP. 2025;17:100575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rcsop.2025.100575
2. Fried I. OpenAI says ChatGPT usage has doubled since last year. Axios. Published August 29, 2024. Accessed February 19, 2025. https://www.axios.com/2024/08/29/openai-chatgpt-200-million-weekly-active-users
3. Noman AA, Fahim A, Tonny TS, et al. Harnessing the potential of ChatGPT in pharmacy management: a concise review. Explor Digit Health Technol. 2024;2(5):259-270. https://doi.org/10.37349/edht.2024.00026
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