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You've got it backwards. Pharmacists are hired because it's legally required. They're there to catch the dosage mistakes, look out for potential interactions, a
by ng12 7y ago
You've got it backwards. Pharmacists are hired because it's legally required. They're there to catch the dosage mistakes, look out for potential interactions, and to answer questions about medication and the proper usage. You cannot legally distribute prescription medication without a pharmacist physically present.
CVS and Walgreens would love to get rid of the pharmacists -- they hate that each store needs a couple $110k/year pharmacists just to handle the legal requirements and to be on-site for the few cases where something needs extra attention. That's why they put them to work doing the manual retail side of it to get the most for their dollar.
- creddit 7y agoWhat is it the OP got backwards? They're not really disagreeing with anything you said, though you give more color with regards to drug interactions.
- ng12 7y agoBecause it's not the case that the pharmacist is automatable. A small fraction of the work is completely un-automatable and the easily automatable stuff is just busy work. Even if you automated it they'd still have to hire a pharmacist, he would just have less to do.
- creddit 7y agoDrug interactions are basically the perfect type of thing to automate. It's just a lookup. For usage questions, how many parameters does that vary on? Amount, frequency symptomm? Seems very easy to automate as well. The only thing not able to be automated is law abidance. This would require changing of the law.
- Double_a_92 7y ago> For usage questions, how many parameters does that vary on? Amount, frequency symptomm? Seems very easy to automate as well. The pharmacist couldn't even know exactly. That is probably mostly to check for order of magnitudes errors (missed commas, additional 0s).
- bluGill 7y agoDrug interactions are not a lookup. Some people have problems some do not. We don't even have interaction data on all possible combinations of two different drugs, much less all the 6+ different drugs that some people are taking. There is a lot of "Educated guesswork". For someone only taking one drug for a couple weeks and the a year latter a different drug for a few weeks it is easy.
- anthonypasq 7y agoOk? So its a data problem, not a technical problem. Just get the data from pharmacy textbook into a computer. Its not that hard.
- creddit 7y agoSeems like there would be the possibility of WFH pharmacists whose job is to do the educated guesswork on any newly observed combo. Log it into the system after some validation and voila we have timeless knowledge for all who come later, automated at low costs.
- xnyan 7y agoIt's legally required because even with a prescription, an untrained person can't just walk to a hypothetical drug store with everything on the shelf and safely select what's written down. There are too many chances to make mistakes, misreading the label, self diagnoses and prescription of dangerous substances, etc. This can be addressed by automated, human-free system with tech we have today. Your doc sends a valid Rx, a box dispenses your drug. I don't know if it would be cost effective today, but we could do it and it stands to reason that one day it will be cheaper than doing it (validating substances and dose) with one highly trained human counting pills by hand at every single location. Potentially dangerous drug interactions and instructions can be solved by automation for what can be automated and tele-pharmacists in all others.
- moduspol 7y agoWe already have mail order pharmacies, so it's not too big of a stretch.
- ng12 7y agoThere's still a human pharmacist on the other end of every single order, it just gets sent in the mail instead of handed over the counter.
- moduspol 7y agoOf course, but my comment was in response to the claims of the comment I responded to. It was not a claim that pharmacists are not involved.
- ng12 7y agoA very large part of what pharmacists do is double-check the doctor's work. Mistakes, miscommunication, overlooked drug interactions, etc. In a sense the purpose of a pharmacist is having an accredited person dispense the medication as part of the pharmacy's liability insurance.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]