Artificial Intelligence in Pharmacy Practice: Applications, Challenges, and the Evolving Role of the Pharmacist

Author

Dr. Kavya M. L., Dr. Goutham Gowda B, Dr. Ashwini Bhide M. A, Dr. Umesh M, Dr. K Hanumanthachar Joshi


Abstract

 Artificial intelligence (AI) has moved from a research concept to a working tool in healthcare, and pharmacy is one of the professions where its influence is growing fastest. Machine learning models now help detect medication errors, prioritise drug-interaction alerts, forecast inventory, support dosing decisions, and speed up the early stages of drug discovery. More recently, large language models have opened a new channel for patient counselling and drug-information retrieval. This review describes how AI is being applied across community, hospital and clinical pharmacy settings, summarises the evidence available for each application, and discusses the barriers that currently limit safe adoption, including algorithmic bias, limited explainability, data privacy, regulatory uncertainty and the tendency of generative models to produce confident but incorrect statements. The review argues that AI is best understood as a decision-support layer that extends, rather than replaces, pharmaceutical care, and that pharmacists must acquire basic data and AI literacy to supervise these systems responsibly. Priorities for future practice, education and research are outlined.



Keywords

artificial intelligence; pharmacy practice; clinical pharmacy; medication safety; machine learning; large language models; pharmacovigilance; personalised medicine



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