Q&A: The Rise of AI in Alleviating Health Care Workforce Challenges
Scott Nelson, PharmD, MS, FAMIA, ACHIP, discussed the increasingly crucial role artificial intelligence has played in streamlining pharmacy services.
When it comes to technological advancements within health care, the focus is typically on ways to improve the lives of patients and make staying healthy a bit easier than before. However, in order to ensure patients are receiving care of the highest value, technology should also be designed to alleviate workforce pressures among health care providers.
In the past few years, no other technology has been targeted for use in health care—and most other industries— quite like artificial intelligence (AI).
“The current workforce shortage is significant, and it's not just in pharmacy, but also in nursing, radiology, respiratory therapists, and other places. The idea has been that we're just not able to get enough people. By leveraging AI technology, we're able to do more with less. That's been definitely a major catalyst,” said Scott Nelson, PharmD, MS, FAMIA, ACHIP.
Nelson discussed what we currently know about AI technologies and how he thinks it can evolve within pharmacy these next few decades.
Nelson was a co-author of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) 2025 Pharmacy Forecast. He sat down with Drug Topics to discuss in greater detail a section of the report titled “Navigating Generative AI: Opportunity and Risk.” In our interview with Nelson, we explored AI’s ability to alleviate health care workforce shortages as well as the overall opportunities and challenges regarding its implementation.
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: How Health Systems Must Navigate Pharmacy, Medical Benefits
Drug Topics: Can you briefly summarize both the challenges and opportunities presented by introducing AI to alleviate workforce issues?
Scott Nelson: The current workforce shortage is significant, and it's not just in pharmacy, but also in nursing, radiology, respiratory therapists, and other places. The idea has been that we're just not able to get enough people. By leveraging AI technology, we're able to do more with less. That's been definitely a major catalyst. In that way, it's helping alleviate the strain of not having enough people to fill the [full-time equivalent positions (FTEs)] and could be filling FTEs with the AI tools. That is one of the ways that this is justified to the financial departments, and things like that, for implementing these technologies. But I think what that is actually going to translate to is having fewer FTEs performing administrative tasks, doing those things that aren't really all that fun to do anyways. The workforce is just going to shift and change and adapt to new roles. There will be different pharmacy services available, or maybe we can provide pharmacy services at a larger scale. I know that there's several population health initiatives that we have, that we would love to do, but we just don't have enough people in order to scale it to the population that we care for. Hopefully the adoption of AI can help alleviate some of those resource [complications] that we have.
I see it kind of helping fill in a gap that we currently have. I also see it as history repeating itself. When there's a new technology, there's some jobs that go away, but there's new jobs that are created, and the workforce adapts and changes. I like the [computerized provider order entry (CPOE)] analogy. When CPOE was coming on board, I remember hearing discussions about, “Well, what are we going to have pharmacists do now that they don't have to transcribe orders anymore?” Well, CPOE came and it didn't take away pharmacy jobs. Pharmacists are still here. Even with clinical decision support that went into CPOE to help with dose range checking, drug-drug interactions, and a lot of the things that we check for. One, it just wasn't enough and probably won't ever be enough. And two, it allowed pharmacy services to expand into other places. We see now a lot more decentralized services. We see pharmacists doing other things that we just haven't done in the past. I think it's a great opportunity to leverage our clinical skills more and expand more into the clinical space, and again, looking at how we interact with other members on the care team and with our patients and connecting with people.
Drug Topics: This section of the report states that most health systems will begin to adopt AI to facilitate pharmacist documentation in the electronic health record. What will the adoption of AI in health systems look like in the near future? Will there be clear challenges or are health systems prepared for the likely rise of generative AI?
Scott Nelson: The adoption of AI, and especially the generative AI, is accelerating pretty quickly. Even though the evidence is lacking, there still is definitely a perceived benefit because of a decreased cognitive burden when using the large language models. For answering or responding to patient messages, or with the ambient scribe technology, we haven't really seen that much of a time saving difference, but the providers seem satisfied with it because it helps make their job easier. I think what we're still going to see is more widespread adoption of that. I see that coming into pharmacy practice, because pharmacists are also in the electronic health record, documenting notes, counseling patients, that kind of stuff.
I think there's going to be some challenges that come up. Some of the clear challenges already are the infrastructure and cost associated with these technologies. For example, these generative AI technologies utilize a lot of compute power and need a lot of infrastructure for that. Most of them are way too sophisticated to house on premise or even on your local machine. There's cloud networking technology that needs to be done in order to leverage other resources at scale. But that all comes with cost. There's also a lot of ethical and legal framework items that need to be worked out. We're seeing that evolving very quickly in those spaces too.
As with the implementation of any new technology, there's always going to be some sort of unintended consequences or new types of challenges that emerge because of this technology. For example, with CPOE, after implementing that, we decreased legibility errors, but then started seeing other types of new errors, like wrong drop-down list pick errors, or just weird, new different things that we hadn't expected; even some inconsistencies in how orders were written. I think we're still waiting to see what are some of the unintended consequences of these technologies.
READ MORE: Health System Resource Center
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