My wife is a clinical pharmacist at a hospital. I am a SWE working on AI/ML related stuff. We've talked about this a lot. She thinks that the current generation of software is not a replacement for what she does now, and finds the alerts they provide mostly annoying. The last time this came up, she gave me two examples:
A) The night before, a woman in her 40's came in to the ER suffering a major psychological breakdown of some kind (she was vague to protect patient privacy). The Dr prescribed a major sedative, and the software alerted that they didn't have a negative pregnancy test because this drug is not approved for pregnant women and so should not be given. However, in my wife's clinical judgement- honed by years of training, reading papers, going to conferences, actual work experience and just talking to colleagues- the risk to a (potential) fetus from the drug was less than the risk to a (potential) fetus from mom going through an untreated mental health episode and so she approved the drug and overrode the alert.
B) A prescriber had earlier in that week written a script for Tylenol to be administered "PR" (per-rectum) rather than PRN (per requisite need). PR Tylenol is a perfectly valid thing that is sometimes the correct choice, and was stocked by the hospital for that reason. But my wife recognized that this wasn't one of the cases where that was necessary, and called the nurse to call the prescriber to get that changed so the nurse wouldn't have to give them a Tylenol suppository. This time there were no alerts, no flags from the software, it was just her looking at it and saying "in my clinical judgement, this isn't the right administration for this situation, and will make things worse".
So someone- with expensively trained (and probably licensed) judgement- will still need to look over the results of this AI pharmacist and have the power to override its decisions. And that means that they will need to have enough time per case to build a mental model of the situation in their brain, figure out what is happening, and override if necessary. And it needs to be someone different from the person filling out the Rx, for Swiss cheese model of safety reasons.
Congratulations, we've just described a pharmacist.
> And it needs to be someone different from the person filling out the Rx, for Swiss cheese model of safety reasons.
This is something I question. If you go to a specialist, and the specialist judges that you need surgery, he can just schedule and perform the surgery himself. There’s no other medical professional whose sole job is to second-guess his clinical judgment. If you want that, you can always get a second opinion. I have a hard time buying the argument that prescription drugs always need that second level of gatekeeping when surgery doesn’t.
So, the main reason for the historical separation (in the European tradition) between doctor and pharmacist was profit motive- you didn't want the person prescribing to have a financial stake in their treatment, else they will prescribe very expensive medicine for all cases. And surgeons in particular do have a profit motive- they are paid per service- and it is well known within the broader medical community that surgeons will almost always choose to cut. And we largely gate-keep this with the primary care physician providing a recommendation to the specialist. The PCP says "this may be something worth treating with surgery" when they recommend you go see a specialist rather than prescribing something themselves, and then the surgeon confirms (almost always).
That pharmacists also provide a safety check is a more modern benefit, due to their extensive training and ability to see all of the drugs that you are on (while a specialist only knows what they have prescribed). And surgeons also have a team to double-check them while they are operating, to confirm that they are doing the surgery on the correct side of the body, etc. Because these safety checks are incredibly important, and we don't want to lose them.
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