Utilizing Artificial Intelligence Behind the Counter

PC: What role does AI play in the pharmacy setting?

Hawkins: You've got two areas in a pharmacy environment where AI can have a big impact. We can look at it from the logistics and the operations of the pharmacy, and we can also look at it from the interaction with the patient. Let's start with the logistics of the pharmacy. We can start simple and talk about automating routine tasks, which take a long time in the pharmacy and slow down operational efficiency. This could be things such as control interaction checking. When a prescription arrives at the pharmacy, you punch the prescription in, you see if that patient is taking any other medications that would cause that would cause a conflict or a problem. And that's something that happens with every prescription fill—an operational blocker. We can start to automate those kinds of tasks with prescription verification. We can reduce errors on data input by having AI living within the operational center of the pharmacy, and you can build out from there into things like logistics, into things like stock management, into things like predicting seasonal trends to ensure that you always have the correct supply on hand. There's a logistics impact inside the pharmacy to increasing the bandwidth of teams and being more accurate in the way that you are managing the efficacy of the business.

Then, if we move over to the patient side, we have the opportunity to customize and tailor patient messaging and patient care in a way that we've never been able to before and be able to do that at scale. We can talk about how communicate with patients in a way that they want to be communicated with, looking at having the bandwidth to give—every patient—a personalized touch in the way that you communicate.

Some interesting things that are happening right now are things like AI voice calls, for example. AI voice calls are very close right now to being indistinguishable between human calls, and it gives a way for a call to happen to a patient. Let's take someone, for example, who works during the day when the pharmacy is open. There's nobody around outside of hours to make that call. Maybe that person works shifts. You want to have a touchpoint with them that's at midnight. There's nobody around to work at midnight. An AI call can get through to that person. It has access to their medical profile, it can answer questions, and it can give an experience that was previously not able to be delivered, and you can do that at scale.

You're no longer constrained by how many people you've got available to make that call. I think patient care can be more personalized. You can deliver it at a much bigger scale, and you can deliver it in a way that's appropriate for that patient. You can look at things like age demographics, how this person wants to be communicated with, and apply it very specifically to them.