Pharmacists play a vital role in our economy. They offer personalized healthcare advice, dispense essential medications, and ensure protected drugs stay out of the wrong hands. While it’s a lucrative field at the moment, there are some concerns that AI and robots will take many pharmacist jobs.
Many pharmacists are at risk of losing their jobs in the coming decades. AI and robots will play an increasingly more prominent role in pharmacies, as pill-dispensing robots, prescription delivery services, and ever-improving AI will all be able to do much of the work that pharmacists currently do.
To learn how AI and robots will likely affect pharmacists, read on.
How AI and robots will affect pharmacists
AI and robots are already having a pretty disruptive effect on the pharmacy industry. Here are a few of the most
Automated robot pharmacies
One of the most concerning developments for pharmacists interested in continued employment is the development of automated robot pharmacies. One of the most prominent robot pharmacies is at theUCSF Medical Center. A centralized prescription distribution center staffed entirely by robots (the PillPick Automated Packaging and Dispensing System) has been successfully portioning and filling prescriptions for more than seven years. And when I say successfully, I mean it: the robot pharmacy at UCSF has a 100% accuracy rating when it comes to dispensing correct amounts of medication.
These pharmacy robots then hand off the drugs to aTUG autonomous robot, which then travels around the hospital and drops off the medication at the appropriate nursing centers. While there are still some humans involved in the process, UCSF was able to reassign many of its pharmacists to different positions.
While automated robot pharmacies like this are currently relegated to large hospitals, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that neighborhood pharmacies could pick them up. This becomes even more likely if devices like the PillPick system continue to decrease in price.
If these automated systems do replace traditional pharmacy setups, we would need fewer pharmacists to work at our local stores. This alone is a potential threat to pharmacist employment, but it’s not the only threat.
Amazon’s Pillpack
While million-dollar pharmacist robots are cool, the prohibitive cost makes it unlikely that they will be replacing humans en masse anytime soon.
The more likely cause of mass pharmacist unemployment comes in the form of Amazon and their newly-acquired company,PillPack.
PillPack is essentially Amazon for prescription medications. Once you sign up, they’ll ship you your medicine and automatically refill it when it runs out. PillPack will even call your doctor’s office to get your prescription information sorted out. It’s an incredibly convenient service that eliminates the need for a local pharmacist.
Now, people are habitual creatures, and many will continue to use their local pharmacies even in the face of this more convenient option. Some people also genuinely need the help and guidance of a human pharmacist when it comes to dosing and taking their medication, so those consumers will likely forever be patrons of their local pharmacy. And other people who take Schedule II drugs (highly controlled substances like oxycodone and Adderall) won’t be able to get their scripts delivered either.
But as the years go on, and the younger and more tech-savvy generations make up more of the economy, an increasing amount of people will turn to convenient, time-saving solutions like PillPack instead of driving somewhere every time they need to pick up a new prescription.
If you want evidence for this claim, look at how e-commerce has affected brick and mortar stores. Malls and shops are closing down all over the world as Amazon, Alibaba, and other e-commerce behemoths are offering better prices on better products and shipping them to your doorstep to boot. Eventually, Amazon will do the same to pharmacies, and pharmacists will suffer as a result.
How pharmacists can adapt
While the picture painted in the previous section might seem grim, hope is far from lost. Although it’s becoming clearer by the day that pharmacists will need to adapt, they are also in a terrific position to benefit from the AI-driven technological improvement currently sweeping over the globe.
For starters, robotics creations like the PillPick will free up pharmacists from the menial task of sorting and counting pills to do more meaningful and useful work. They’ll be able to give their customers more one-on-one consultation time, and their level of fulfillment and the customer’s satisfaction will both grow.
And as shown by the introduction of the PillPick and TUG robots to the UCSF Medical Center, automating these menial tasks does not necessarily mean people will be getting fired. UCSF was able to reassign their idle human pharmacists to other jobs, and other medical facilities will likely be able to follow in their footsteps.
One potential solution lies in the legislative process. In 2016, Californiaauthorized pharmacistswith a certain baseline of training to provide several essential healthcare services previously reserved for doctors:
- Prescribing certain medications (like birth control and nicotine patches)
- Reviewing medical records
- Taking a more active and helpful role in primary care
If other states and countries follow California’s lead, pharmacists around the world might be able to take on some of the healthcare workload that is currently the sole responsibility of the world’s doctors. This may also reduce the strain on the healthcare industry, which could decrease months-long wait times to see doctors and free up those doctors to help people with more serious ailments.
The threat of ever-improving AI
All of the assumptions made in this article are based on the current level of artificial intelligence. While today’s AI implementations are too primitive to stand a chance at replacing pharmacists, tomorrow’s improved AI might tell a different story. Nobody knows how quickly artificial intelligence will improve, just as nobody knows the heights of effectiveness it will reach.
History shows us that technology is getting better at an accelerating rate. It took humanity thousands of years to develop the world’s first computer. From there, it only took a few decades to get from unbelievably slow and weak computers that took up whole buildings to powerful tabletop machines. And it only took a single decade to get to insanely powerful devices that can fit in the palm of your hand.
If this pattern of accelerating change continues, the capabilities of artificial intelligence five years from now may be at a level previously thought impossible. This is a potential problem that goes far beyond pharmacists, but it includes them too.
So if AI continues to provide new solutions in the pharmacy industry, pharmacists may not be able to adapt, and many may find themselves in need of a new job sooner than they thought they would.
