Time we made AI a priority in pharmacy field

This year’s World Pharmacy Day, which was marked on Friday, should not only prompt us to reflect on the gains by the profession in Kenya but, more importantly, on the increasing challenges that pharmacy businesses continue to face, including the growing demand for prescriptions amid shortages and higher operation costs.

The success of the pharmacy business is often characterised by enhanced workflow efficiency, lower operation costs and measures to promote safety, accuracy and efficiency in dispensing. And while automations have introduced improvements in patient care, the retail and wholesale pharmacy business space still largely operates on transactional-based model with little regard to improved quality healthcare and value creation. That often impedes the ability to generate sustainable positive business outcomes in the longer term.

The situation is compounded by disorganised electronic records across healthcare databases; inability of pharmacists to access healthcare databases, making quality dispensing hard; the distributive nature of healthcare data, which leaves little room for quality patient care; and the complexity and time lag in healthcare interventions due to the retrospective nature of retrieving healthcare data.

But being a key stakeholder of the healthcare system, the pharmacy space should transform from merely a medical fulfilment location to a health management centre that offers an expanded suite of personalised healthcare and other services — like immunisations and cancer and diabetes screening. This would be essential towards integration of precision public health and telemedicine into the universal health coverage (UHC) programme

Modern automation

That means the pharmacy field should invest in modern automation — like artificial intelligence (AI), which has revolutionised hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry. This has been through, particularly, analysis of complex medical data, disease diagnosis, development of treatment protocols and drug development, resulting in an expansive medical data collection and faster processing, seamless genetic and pharmacogenomics databases and medical natural language processing.

AI has profoundly improved operations and enhanced patient care at pharmacies by housing patient utilisation and drug data and identifying drug-related side-effects, for instance, with an impact on clinical decision and support screening.

It is high time the pharmacy profession institutionalised evidence-driven patient care that is also central to treatment compliance and adherence. This year’s World Pharmacy Day should be used to prioritise AI adoption to potentially shift focus of the pharmacies towards a broader continuum of healthcare services, and to enable them to be agile partners in the provision of better healthcare.

Mr Onyango, a pharmaceutical sales rep at GS, is a Global Impact Fellow at MWI. [email protected].