Read the thread from 5 years ago, get that we need people with expertise in medicine _at some point_ in the chain of care, but unclear why it all needs to be at the end.
Background: finding myself needing to visit the pharmacy quite frequently for prescriptions for family members (so no opportunity to visually inspect the patient), whenever the pharmacist goes over dosages and instructions, it’s nearly verbatim what’s printed and in the bag, and it’s always pills. Seems like you could have the pharmacists that check for bad interractions in some pharmacy Mission Control, and my small bottles of pills could be assembled from big bottles of pills by a machine.
In: 0
The pharmacist does a number of things. They communicate with doctors offices to receive orders, they process those orders through insurance companies (at least in the USA), they physically dispense the pills into a bottle for the customer, evaluate potential adverse interactions that the doctor didn’t think of, interact with customers, and maintain an inventory of thousands of different drugs.
A number of those things could be theoretically eliminated (like if the USA moved to universal health care and dealing with insurance was no longer an issue). Other things are much harder to do, like physically counting out and dispensing pills, which would be hard to automate since there are so many different medicines of different forms (all shapes and sizes of pills, liquids, creams etc.). Artificial intelligence systems could potentially help prevent adverse drug interactions, but those systems don’t exist yet in an approved commercially available form.
Latest Answers