Let’s imagine the possibilities and theoretically demo the results based on current knowledge:
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yes AI made the process fast and the patient did not die unnecessarily.
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same but the patient died well.
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same but the patient died.
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same as either 1, 2, or 3 but AI made things slower.
Demo:
Pharmacy: Patient requires amoxicillin for a painful infection of the ear while allergic to penicillin:
AI: Sure! You will find penicillin in Isle 23 box number 5.
Pharmacy: the patient needs amoxicillin actually.
AI: Sure! The Patient must have an allergic reaction to more commonly used anti inflammatory medications.
Pharmacy: actually amoxicillin is more of an antibiotic, where can I find it?
AI: Sure! While you are correct that amoxicillin is an antibiotic, it is a well studied result that after an infection inflammation is reduced. You can find the inflammation through out the body including the region where the infection is located.
Pharmacy: amoxicillin location!
AI: Sure! Amoxicillin was invented in Beecham Research Laboratories.
Actual pharmacist here, working in pharmacy IT.
Unlike other industries, Pharmacy is not particularly thrilled about or interested in AI. In fact, my hospital explicitly blocks access to all LLMs.
I was actually kind of hoping to see what Microsoft is claiming here, and just walked away from this post more confused.
Good thing, you don’t want medical advice from an LLM
You’re not great taking medical advice from a doctor either, seeing how often they’re wrong.
That’s fair, but they tend to be more right than an LLM :P
I was trying to find an article I read about a year ago, about an experiment where AI was assisting a doctor. Where it suggested questions and possible diagnosis for the doctor to look into.
IIRC the result was both faster and more accurate diagnosis. Too bad I can’t find it again now :(
Suggestion: BS from MS about Al
helping a pharmacistfilling RxIs “pharmacists seeing more patients” really a measure of something good? I’m a non-native English speaker so cut me some slack but all I can imagine is just longer queues in the pharmacy and more tired pharmacists (and people who now need to wait in the queue now).
What baffles me is why would you use an LLM when what you need is a digital inventory manager. Not bashing your argument’s merits. On the contrary, I think it depicts very well how people will shove AI-marketed shit on already-solved problems and make everyone’s lives worse because it’s ✨modern✨.
My question is: is it being used for inventory management? Or is it being used to feed the entire patient file in to make sure the Pharmacist doesn’t make a mistake as well. Double checking for conflict in the prescription interactions and stuff like that.
Should it be relied as the only thing? No. Is it nice to have another set of eyes on every task? Probably? Could this be solved with the hiring of more pharmacy techs and an education system not driven by profit margins for the investors that actually facilitates the workforce’s technical skills? Yes.
Idk. Just sounds like shitty companies being shitty companies all the way down.
Further to this, to human is top err - so why would you start to rely on something that’s confidently incorrect so often.
It’s only a matter of time before this misleads someone terribly
I’ve mostly found that smart alerts just overreact to everything and result in alarm fatigue but one of the better features EPIC implemented was actually letting clinicians (like nurses and doctors) rate the alerts and comment on why or why not the alert was helpful so we can actually help train the algorithm even for facility-specific policies.
So for instance one thing I rated that actually turned out really well was we were getting suicide watch alerts on pretty much all our patients and told we needed to get a suicide sitter order because their CSSRS scores were high (depression screening “quiz”). I work in inpatient psychiatry. Not only are half my patients suicidal but a) I already know and b) our environment is specifically designed to manage what would be moderate-high suicide risk on other units by making most of the implements restricted or completely unavailable. So I rated that alert poorly every time I saw it (which was every time I opened each patient’s chart for the first time that shift then every 4 hours after; it was infuriating) and specified that that particular warning needed to not show for our specific unit. After the next update I never saw it again!
So AI and other “smart” clinical tools can work, but they need frequent and high quality input from the people actually using them (and the quality is important, most of my coworkers didn’t even know the feature existed, let alone that they would need to coherently comment a reason for their input to be actionable).
Listening to employees when making decisions, what a concept! It’s a shame many places don’t do that.
What I need is AI to fix my doctor visits. Seems like those fucks expect you to be timely but then make you wait in their waiting room for 15 minutes and then an additional 30 inside the patient room. Oh sure, our time is unimportant, it’s all about you, doc.
Doctors are understaffed and underpaid because insurance is taking all the profit.
This post could have been titled “BS from MS about Al helping an MD”
My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
As a non pharmacist I recommend you take two mitooroxenloxen and then read the title one more time today 😉. Today is your day! Go out there and fuck something up!
I’m part of a coalition trying to prevent a private equity firm from buying out a local nonprofit hospital and using AI to “Improve efficiency” is one of their plans that we’ve had to study (done by people much more competent than I).
The main thing they plan to use AI for is filling out paperwork - nurses will record their introductory interviews with patients and the AI (basically, speech recognition + knowing what fields to fill out for certain information) will automatically fill out that patient’s chart.
I’m sure they’re planning on using AI for other purposes as well, but this is the most prevalent use - speech recognition and filling out charts automatically.
Even if this were true, did the pharmacists get a raise? Are they making more money? Or are they just seeing more patients (doing the extra emotional and mental labor that entails) and paying less attention to each one while Safeway and Walgreens pocket any increased revenue?
If anything, their tech hours got reduced.
They are using AI to help the pharmacist decrypt thedoctors’s writing
Thats actually not a terrible idea.
The pic being blurred and all, I thought it’s going to be some dad joke around “pharmacist can see more patients”
Expert Systems are great for pharmacies, not the bullshit generators currently labeled as “AI.”
I second the comment about this being a reason to reduce technician hours. Worked at the busiest store in my district the last 15 years of my career. We went from 3 pharmacists with several hours overlap on weekdays, down to 2 pharmacists with no overlap. Tech hours once was high enough to have 5 technicians on between 10-6, down to only having 5 total on staff. We went from a 24 location, down to being open only 11.5 hours a day. We were one block up from a Walgreens and one block down from a RiteAid that both ended up closing, and getting most of their customers who walked there. We had 2 major exoduses of staff and lost a good number of long time patients in the enshitification.
Even in a world where some new AI model could improve pharmacist throughput, it doesn’t compare to the skeleton crewing of corporate pharmacy bottom-line-go-up.
I’ll take the non-AI using pharmacist for the win. Thank you very much.
And because their LLM generated advice to people is bound to kill some of them, they can ‘see’ even more of them!
