Q&A: How Pharmacists Can Use AI to Humanize Care
Scott Nelson, PharmD, MS, FAMIA, ACHIP, joined Drug Topics to discuss the 2025 Pharmacy Forecast and AI’s role in the future of pharmacy practice.
Despite artificial intelligence (AI) setting itself apart as commonplace within society, according to industry experts, the health care sector tends to adopt new technologies at a more gradual pace. With its slow but inevitable implementation into pharmacy practice, pharmacists hope that AI can give them back the joy of working in their profession.
“Long term, I really hope that AI can humanize care again and address some significant issues like burnout and just bring back kind of that human element into health care that it feels like we've lost over the years,” said Scott Nelson, PharmD, MS, FAMIA, ACHIP. “I would love to see AI bring joy back into the practice of pharmacy.”
Nelson helped co-author a section of the ASHP 2025 Pharmacy Forecast titled “Navigating Generative AI: Opportunity and Risk.” | image credit: pisan thailand / stock.adobe.com
Contributing to a section titled “Navigating Generative AI: Opportunity and Risk,” Nelson helped co-author the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) 2025 Pharmacy Forecast. He recently caught up with Drug Topics to discuss developments regarding AI and how they will impact the pharmacy profession in 2025 and the long-term future.
Stay tuned for more Drug Topics interviews regarding the ASHP 2025 Pharmacy Forecast. As we meet with authors and industry leaders that contributed to the report, we will discuss some of its most important sections.
READ MORE: Q&A: The Rise of AI in Alleviating Health Care Workforce Challenges
Drug Topics:Can you briefly explain where we’re at now as far as AI within pharmacy practice? How are pharmacists using it now and to what extent has AI become commonplace in pharmacy?
Scott Nelson: AI is already here and already being used. Most of the space is in predictive models. It's also being used a lot with drug discovery, research, purchasing, and inventory management; those kinds of things. Within the clinical context, it's also used in some decision support tools for identifying adverse drug events or even providing more context for alerts and drug information. So, there’re little pieces where it's being used.
The generative AI space is still pretty new, and I would say health care lags behind pretty much everybody else in how quickly we adopt things. But there's been a lot of uptake with the generative AI models. [We’ve] been seeing more of that with like electronic prior authorization, chart summary, helping facilitate writing notes, ambient scribe kinds of things. [This is] where that's starting to take off, but it's all kind of still a work in progress.
Drug Topics: We know that the advancement of AI inside and outside of the health care sector is considerably gradual. By the time AI is fully integrated into the pharmacy profession, what are your long-term hopes for what AI can accomplish in future pharmacy practices?
Scott Nelson: Long term, I really hope that AI can humanize care again and address some significant issues like burnout and just bring back kind of that human element into health care that it feels like we've lost over the years. I would love to see AI bring joy back into the practice of pharmacy. Not just make it so that we can push more widgets through or move more scripts but have more time connecting with people and less time doing administrative tasks; more time doing those things that we do really well as humans, connecting with others.
Drug Topics: Regarding the current state of AI, what advice would you give pharmacists struggling to understand its capabilities and successfully adapt it within their pharmacy setting?
Scott Nelson: There's a lot of opportunity to learn more about AI; what it is, what it's capable of, what it can do, and what it can't really do. I think that there's a lot of science fiction and a lot of stuff that's kind of hyped up that just isn't really practical. [It’s] kind of understanding the limitations of both. I think if we really understood better as a profession how we could leverage the technology at what it's really good at, then we could see a lot more success. There are a lot of resources available for learning more about the topic on AI. There’re articles in various journals, certificate programs, CE programs, a lot of different resources. I recently did some work with ASHP and they have a resource page that they've been putting together for AI. There was an article that a group of us put together on demystifying AI in pharmacy. It was a primer published in AJHP. There’re other things out there to learn more.
I also think just experimenting with the technology is also important. We have the opportunity to play around with a lot of these large language models and generative AI tools. Things like CoPilot, Gemini, you name it—there's so many different models now—[it’s] just kind of playing around with it, being careful to not submit [protected health information] to those environments. You can use it for a lot of different things, for creating simulations of cases, for education, help make synthetic data, help write queries for different things, help brainstorm, and think about problems in different ways. There're lots of different fun ways to play with the technology, and just see what works, what doesn't work. Get more familiar with its strengths, its limitations, and see where it can fit into your workflow.
READ MORE: Health System Resource Center
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