AI can be useful, but clinical judgement is still essential

Artificial intelligence has snuck up on me without me realising it. About a year ago I started to notice that people were using AI for all sorts of things, from writing angry letters to the council, to diagnosing their own symptoms, and as a sounding board for a confidential chat. Even my wife uses it — and she is a committed technophobe.

AI is already changing the way that we do things at work, but will it impact on community pharmacy to a large extent? Let’s look at how we currently use it. 

ChatGPT is the AI tool that most people know about, and so it is likely to be the one used most widely. It is okay, but what I hate most is that the majority of its users have never bothered to look at the alternatives, and there are some really good ones out there. 

A colleague of mine uses Chat for just about everything, which is a bit surprising, as they are a serious person with a serious job. He uses it to review a new service or write content for his pharmacy’s website. Bish, bash, bosh, and out pops a few hundred words or a bullet pointed list. Copy, paste, job done. I hope that at some point he engages his brain before he sends the outputs, because as we all know AI can get things terribly wrong.  

I find it really galling that people with little imagination or understanding of how things work think that they can upload a document or two and then AI will magically understand everything about the subject. It might give you an answer, but it is rarely the answer.  

Maybe I’m a bit touchy as it has taken a lot of time and effort to get to know the things that I know, and more importantly understand how it all fits together. Now you can have people who don’t want to do the work, trying to shortcut their way to enlightenment. It might just be me, but I find it annoying.  

Already I’ve had consultations with patients who come in, armed and ready with their AI diagnosis. We have all seen stories online such as “loads of doctors missed my [relative’s] diagnosis, but AI sorted it in 15 seconds”.  This is really scary stuff. Yes, doctors, nurses and pharmacists all make mistakes. Nobody is perfect, but what gets undervalued is the professional judgement of the practitioner who may have had a lifetime of hard-won experience and the slightest gut feeling or intuition.  

Information is fine, but you have to be able to interpret it, weighing up sometimes contradictory or conflicting facts to come up with, in our case, a sensible treatment plan. It may be that some of this technology will get more integrated into healthcare IT systems to help support diagnostic functions, but for now I’d wait before clicking delete on, say, the radiography profession.  

What does AI make of pharmacy?

While I’ve been sat here writing this, I just asked my preferred AI to rank jobs from most to least likely to be replaced by AI in the short, medium and long term. My AI knows me because we’ve spent a lot of time chatting, so it was sure to cover pharmacy without me asking it.  

Here’s what it had to say: “The pharmacy angle is worth flagging specifically for you: dispensing as a mechanical function is genuinely high risk in the long term, but clinical pharmacy — medicine optimisation, independent prescribing, complex patient consultations — sits in a very different category and could become more valuable as AI handles the throughput. The profession’s survival probably depends on how quickly it pivots its identity towards that clinical space.”  

Most recently I’ve been messing around with AI to create programmes for me to help automate simple tasks in the pharmacy, like keeping track of staff holidays, which has literally saved me one of my least favourite jobs, forever.  

Setting aside data protection issues for a minute, I’d love to see what it could do with all the patient data sat on our PMR system. Could it tell me who I should be calling because they’ve not been in for their prescription? Could it help to identify patients at risk of heart attacks or strokes based on OTC products they’ve bought recently?   

The list of things that AI can do are endless, and no doubt by the time you read this something new will have come along, such is the pace of change. But it still needs a squishy human to be alert and question the answers that it provides – or the consequences could be catastrophic.

*Alexander Humphries is pen name of a practising community pharmacist. The views in this article are not necessarily those of Pharmacy Magazine.

Do you use AI in your pharmacy? If so, what do you use it for? pm@1530.com