AJP Podcast host Carlene McMaugh sits down with Michael Bakker, chief pharmacy information officer for SA Pharmacy, about the barriers to digital transformation for pharmacists, overcoming resistance to change, and what the future might look like.

The pair discuss common misconceptions about AI – including that it could replace key health workers such as pharmacists.

“We’re not talking about robo pharmacists, right?” says Bakker. “There’s tasks and processes that will be impacted by the advent of AI, but they could also happen with non-AI things.

“If we took one task and process just to kind of put it under the microscope, a hospital pharmacy service spends probably about a third of their clinical workforce time on performing medication histories.

“And so you could go, ‘well, there’s many different ways that digitally, we could do that a lot better now if we just had better linked data or atomic data around medicines where it’s easy to go, oh, this person’s on perindopril five milligrams once a day, and it’s easy to convert that over to your hospital system.

“And you can see the dispensing record for the patient, and if we had all of the dispensing records and prescribing records going up to My Health Record, it’s pretty easy to conceptualise a way where you go, ‘well, I can see that they’re on that regularly. I’m just going to convert that to their hospital medicine and just continue that there’.

“That could be done without any AI.

“The technology is not the barrier there. It’s the investment and the prioritisation of that development work that needs to be there and having the high quality data sitting in my health record to be able to reutilise it.

“They might sound like big things, but they’re quite small. It’s not like we’re waiting for some technology to come along that doesn’t exist yet.

“The AI ones that I think scare people is around the decision making and to be able to decide what to do, and the door’s starting to open there as to what that future state might look like to my network.”

Bakker told McMaugh he had recently posted to LinkedIn about the United States having opened the policy door to having AI agents being able to prescribe for patients.

“It’s just a very interesting concept that it’s not an automated thing that they can do this, they need to undergo all of their approvals through the FDA.”

While he is not aware of this happening in practice, Bakker says it poses the question: what would this look like?

“Is that going to be an AI agent is taking an action on behalf of say a prescriber when they’re talking to their patient. So they’re saying, ‘I’m going to give you amoxicillin 500mg four times a day’ and then it’s just going to generate the prescription.

“And so that’s kind of minimally invasive and risky. You have to prove quality and things like that so that it’s not going to mistake the drug name or anything; or is it going to be far more dystopian where it’s going to diagnose and take action to prescribe a recommended therapy for a patient, which is a little bit more scary?

“So not everything is a one or a zero or a yes and a no.

“There’s lots of gradients in between in there, and so I think people get very alarmed and rightfully so as to what the really crazy dystopian future might look like and what’s my role going to be in that if these things come about.

“But there’s a lot of work in between where we can just see the chipping away at tasks and processes through better technology, that are things that take an enormous amount of time, as good as the pharmacy workforce is at doing these types of things thoroughly…

“If we were reviewing information that was presented to us that was kind of curated so that we don’t have to go and do a preliminary history for a patient, then go into the patient room and validate it with them, then come out, reconcile it with what they’re actually on and then get it changed, we can walk straight in going, ‘well, I can see what you’re normally taking, but can you help me understand how you’re actually using these on a day to day?’

“You could be saving an hour a day for a clinical pharmacist that can be redirected into other tasks.”

00:56 – “Digital maturity can mean lots of things.”

02:24 – Getting started

03:27 – Barriers to digital transformation

06:44 – Insights from developing the Australian practice standard for pharmacy informatics

10:03 – How is AI currently being used to manage medicine safety, especially in rural or remote areas?

13:43 – No robo pharmacists

19:22 – How can pharmacists who are not tech experts start to build their digital literacy and become effective champions for changing their workplaces?

22:23 – Retaining the human touch

25:44 – Encouraging buy-in, including from pharmacists who have concerns

28:20 – “Soft skills are crucial.”

29:51 – Using AI to build a strong business case for new initiatives

32:56 – The most exciting emerging AI and digital trends

34:53 – As pharmacy workflows become more digitalised, what new types of dispensing and prescribing errors are we seeing and how can we mitigate them?

37:51 – “Get great at pharmacy first at all areas of pharmacy.”

39:27 – How could pharmacy look in 10 to 15 years?

41:46 – Learning from other sectors

You can access the full transcript of this podcast here. While we endeavour to ensure all important words and phrases are correct, please note there may be some minor inaccuracies in the transcription.

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