The past few months have been quiet on my end with posts on The Digital Apothecary but for a good reason. I have been traveling around the country, meeting a lot of different stakeholders (academics, professional organizations, local leaders, digital health companies, pharma), and invited as an SME/KOL to speak on the potential impact of AI for the pharmacy profession. It's a given that OpenAI and Google LLMs have caused consternation in the pharmacy profession. For some time, the specter of AI and automation playing a threat to some of the roles of pharmacists and technicians has been simme ..read more

Several years ago, I sat down over a few days with individuals across multiple pharmaceutical companies to understand whether using digital health products would help with clinical trials. At the time, there was a rising interest that using these devices could help inspire siteless clinical trials, help facilitate enrollment and retention of participants and that new digital biomarkers would allow new outcomes to be evaluated for drug approvals.  The feedback I received was it just wasn't time. Why break the mold, even with its faults, when it was producing the results expected? To engag ..read more

It's late in the evening, and I'm running to the pharmacy. Kids at home with a fever. Where is the medicine? What medicine? Let's assume I open the store's app and ask it, "what fever medicine can I give to a 6-year-old?" Then it shows a guided path on the floor I follow and highlights a box of medication on the shelf for me, alongside a discount I can use at the register. This will likely be the future, with a combination of augmented reality (AR) and the ability of AI chatbots that can process consumer requests. The pharmacy companies will leverage this to drive consumer engagement and serv ..read more

It's the morning, and it's time to get to business. Sitting on the toilet, scrolling through your email and social media, and then you get an alert: "Electrolyte imbalance & high glucose detected in your urine." This is all due to the recent smart sensor that you installed in your toilet. It's been monitoring your urine and fecal excretions, and now you're seeing the results. So. The question becomes twofold: How close are we too smart toilets in the home, and Do we need smart toilets? What's the deal with Smart Toilets? The idea isn't necessarily new and has been a topic in Sci-Fi ..read more

ChaptGPT is generating quite the storm as of late, and I want to give my own thoughts on how I view the impact of this type of technology. Is it really as transformative as some people are saying? Is AI going to destroy the role of pharmacists? Are robots going to take our jobs and make us irrelevant?! Let's dig in. Do Robots Dream of Electric Drugs? I have always loved sci-fi, and the concepts of technology and humanity have always been a clashing point for some great plot lines. Whether it ranges from Bladerunner, Snow Crash, Cyberpunk, or Ghost in the Shell, the concept of merging technol ..read more

With great sorrow, I learned that Kevin Clauson, PharmD, had passed away this past week. For those that did not directly know Kevin have been affected by his work and passion in the profession. Many informatics pharmacists and those interested in tech follow in Kevin's footsteps. His work was important and seminal in establishing key concepts we can build upon. What made this work even rarer is the kindness that extended this work into opportunities for others. Beyond the pioneering ground broken by his work, Kevin’s impact will continue to resonate through the introductions he fostered over ..read more

A frequent question I am asked is, “How do you keep up with digital health?” And, to be honest, it’s tough. I have over a decade of experience focused on digital health spanning interests ranging from research to business deals, and the number of resources I pull from has grown based on an exponentially growing interest in this area within the past few years. Nowadays, I find myself checking my favorite resources for news, recent research, opinions, and what the recent buzz is within digital health. So, what resources do I use? I break them down into the following: Digital health publicatio ..read more

It goes without saying that I have been a proponent of the role of digital health in pharmacy education. Between speaking nationally, internationally and publishing multiple articles on the topic, it has been a goal of mine to see my profession embrace digital health as a means of adapting to the future of healthcare. Naively, I had hoped this change would happen in the 2010s, and it took the ongoing pandemic to see a pivot for many health businesses to utilize ongoing technological products to provide virtual care to their patients. We know that payers, providers, and the entire healthscape ..read more

Well, I guess it's time to take a crack at trying to create a theoretical framework of how I would introduce digital health into the curriculum. Look, I've been a pharmacy professor for almost a decade, so that's my bread and butter and what I am going to use as a case example - but I have no reason this same approach couldn't be approached by other health schools (e.g., PA, NP, MD/DO, nursing).  So if you are interested to see the approach, read along. I think this will be beneficial for several groups: For those that are academically focused, this might help get you thinking of how t ..read more

Digital Health. Digital Medicine. Digital Therapeutics. Are they buzz words or the future of care? I don't know, and honestly, I don't care. They are terms that are recognized in the industry, adopted by regulators, and will likely stick around until the 2030s. So for the interim time, these terms are needed as we undergo a level of digitalization of health care that has been needed for the past decade, and the pandemic has finally forced upon us. That sounds great. New treatments, new business options, hopefully, improved patient outcomes, and some level of cost reduction. But as I've been c ..read more