Becker’s asked pharmacy executives from hospitals and health systems, along with academic medical centers and universities across the U.S. to share the future of AI in the pharmacy workforce field.
The 16 executives featured in this article are all speaking at Becker’s Healthcare 3rd Annual Fall Chief Pharmacy Officer Summit, set for Nov. 4-6 at the Swissotel Chicago.
To learn more about this event, click here.
If you would like to join as a reviewer, please contact Mariah Muhammad at mmuhammad@beckershealthcare.com or agendateam@beckershealthcare.com.
As part of an ongoing series, Becker’s is talking to healthcare leaders who will speak at our conference. The following are answers from our speakers at the event.
Question: How will AI reshape your workforce within the next two years?
Nilesh Desai. Chief Pharmacy Officer of University of Miami Health System (Fla.): Over the next two years, I see AI profoundly reshaping our workforce in several ways. AI is already making an impact with prior authorization, auditing, and clinical decision support. But additionally, automation of repetitive tasks will free up our pharmacy staff to focus more on clinical care, patient counseling, and strategic initiatives that truly require their expertise. The goals for AI integration are to make accurate and quicker data-driven decisions, enhancing patient safety and predictive analytics for inventory management.
Ronnah Alexander. Chief Pharmacy Officer of Regional Health Care Affiliates, Health First Community Health Center (Providence, Ky.): In the next few years, AI will reshape the framework of existing clinical workflows to enhance information gathering, clinical visits, billing, and coding, along with many more operations yet to be discovered. During this process of development, we will encounter both great benefits and setbacks as we work out the kinks. However, the biggest mistake we can make is allowing others to advance their systems while we sit back, wait and do nothing. As this new technology advances, we will see the current market shift to those leaders who can excel and make AI work for them. Those that do it well will be at the head of the pack and those that don’t will be left behind.
Ashley Galla, PharmD. Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer of Vivo Health at Northwell Health (New Hyde Park, N.Y.): Within the next two years, AI will fundamentally transform how our pharmacy teams work, enabling expanded reach, improved outcomes, and enhanced employee satisfaction. We’re envisioning AI as a workforce amplifier across three key dimensions. First, by automating manual, non-clinical tasks, we’ll dramatically improve service efficiencies, creating much-needed capacity that allows us to extend our reach to more patients who need our expertise. Second, AI will serve as a powerful compliance partner, auditing complex processes in real-time to enhance adherence to best practices and increase the likelihood of achieving desired clinical and operational outcomes. Finally, AI’s ability to identify meaningful trends within massive datasets will transform how we make business decisions, shifting from reactive problem-solving to proactive, data-informed strategy. The result will be a workforce that spends less time on administrative tasks and more time on high-value clinical activities, leading to greater professional fulfillment and, most importantly, better patient care.
Dorinda Segovia, PharmD. Vice President and Chief Pharmacy Officer of Memorial Healthcare System (Hollywood, Fla.): Over the next two years pharmacists will increasingly use AI tools for routine tasks including pre-screen orders, summarize relevant labs/history, prioritize high-risk interventions, and suppress low-value alerts. Early systems are already targeting medication verification workflows that consume a substantial portion of pharmacist time and as AI becomes embedded in EHR, pharmacists will become critical validators of AI medication recommendations and safety guardrails.
AI promises to have clinical pharmacists spend less time documenting and more time on direct patient management, at the bedside, managing exceptions, complex therapies, stewardship, and actively engage in interdisciplinary clinical decision-making rather than routine queue processing.
In ambulatory and specialty pharmacy, AI scribes will likely automate medication histories, refill documentation, and care plans. AI agents are rapidly being deployed for prior authorizations, appeals, benefits investigation, and payer communication. This is particularly important for outpatient infusion centers, specialty pharmacies, and high-cost therapies, where administrative burden currently delays care and consumes pharmacy FTEs.
Sterling Elliott, PharmD. Clinical Pharmacist Lead of Ambulatory Surgery Practice, Surgery and Procedures at Northwestern Medicine (Chicago): This is one of the hottest questions asked regardless of profession. AI has so many applications, and the truth is no one knows how it will start to be applied. Right now, AI is best at assimilating large volumes of data with efficiency that humans cannot match. It still has a long way to go with respect to judgements grounded in complexity. I believe this means the first widespread application of AI technology will be leveraged to provide experts with well-organized data so they can apply their bevy of knowledge and experience to deploy complex plans in a timelier manner. Success in healthcare is commonly the result of efficiently timed solutions. I believe the pharmacy workforce is headed in the direction of mobilizing to meet these new demands of care optimization.
Madeline Camejo. Vice President of Pharmacy Services and Chief Pharmacy Officer at Baptist Health South Florida (Coral Gables, Fla.): At Baptist Health South Florida we are investing in workforce transformation with our IT department because AI will require an investment in upskilling and change management of workflows within our pharmacy. Today we are on an Epic journey and beginning to define what the new tools will look like for three areas:
Specialty pharmacy will see the greatest impact, with AI supporting prior authorizations, benefit investigations, and adherence workflows. Pharmacists will shift toward exception management, therapy optimization, and financial stewardship, while technicians take on expanded operational roles. Key metrics will focus on time-to-therapy, exception rates, and margin protection.
Inpatient pharmacy will leverage AI for order verification support, clinical alerting, and inventory optimization. Pharmacists remain the final clinical authority, focusing on high-risk medication management and interdisciplinary care. Success will be measured through safety indicators such as alert fatigue reduction and near-miss prevention.
Ambulatory pharmacy will use AI to scale population health efforts, including adherence monitoring, refill prediction, and care gap identification. Pharmacists will act as population health clinicians, while technicians support care navigation and outreach. Metrics will emphasize adherence improvement, gap closure, and downstream utilization avoidance.
Across all settings, AI will shift pharmacy teams from transactional work to higher value clinical judgment, oversight, and patient-centered care. Workforce roles will elevate, not shrink, with increased expectations around AI supervision, decision-making, and accountability.
Ultimately, I believe AI will enable greater efficiency while elevating the role of the pharmacist, creating a more agile and innovative workforce positioned to improve access, clinical outcomes, and the overall patient experience. Pharmacists will become the supervisors of clinical intelligence, not the processors of tasks.
Kelley Curtis. Chief Pharmacy Officer and Vice President of Pharmacy and Lab COE at St. Luke’s Health System-Idaho (Boise): Over the next two years, I think AI is going to significantly change how pharmacy teams spend their time. Instead of getting buried in repetitive administrative work, our teams will be able to focus more on patient care, clinical decision-making, and helping patients navigate increasingly complex therapies and access challenges. We have built many layers of manual processes over the years, especially around prior authorizations, documentation, and operational coordination, and AI gives us an opportunity to simplify that work instead of just asking people to work faster.
At St. Luke’s, we’re already seeing this firsthand in our medication access workflows. By integrating AI into prior authorization processes, we’ve reduced turnaround times and relieved a significant administrative burden on our teams. More importantly, it’s creating capacity for this team to spend more time helping patients who truly need hands-on support and problem solving. I also think our teams will need to be comfortable working alongside AI tools, using data differently, and continuously improving workflows. We are going to be challenged by significant change but I’m excited to see where we go as I believe AI will not replace healthcare professionals, because empathy, trust, communication, and clinical judgment will only become more important as AI takes over repetitive tasks.
Steven Schultz, PharmD. Vice President of Pharmacy at JPS Health System (Fort Worth, Texas): Within the next two years, AI will hopefully reshape our workforce to free staff to perform high value clinical pharmacy activities and increase patient safety. This would include AI-supported clinical decision support that expands upon existing verification features as well as streamline low acuity documentation, auditing, or prior authorization services. As pharmacy leaders, we have to be prepared to implement this technology to streamline existing services while allowing staff to focus on higher-touch and higher-impact services. We need to be more present with our patients and focus heavily on building relationships with both patients and colleagues. With unlimited information at your fingertips, there is a higher emphasis on how you synthesize, summarize and convey the information.
Brian Benson. Executive Director of Pharmacy at UnityPoint Health (West Des Moines, Iowa): AI may have an impact on a couple of areas within hospital pharmacy and transition of care. For instance, reviewing patient’s current diagnoses’ and active medication list, helping determine what may need prior authorization prior to discharge and initiate the process. This initiation may even include alerting the care team that the process has started or the alert that all prior authorizations have been completed. This could be from medications being prescribed post discharge to follow-up tests and procedures where AI can assist the healthcare team with the processes for PAs. We could see AI assist with inventory management allowing multi-campus connectivity and optimization of workflows. Lastly, we will continue to leverage AI with our diversion monitoring programs.
Fatimah Muhammad. Director of 340B Pharmaceutical Services, Specialty Pharmacy, Drug Replacement and ADM Pharmaceutical Services at Saint Peter’s University Hospital (New Brunswick, N.J.): AI will not replace the pharmacy workforce in the next two years, but it will fundamentally change how that workforce is deployed and measured. The immediate impact will be in shifting pharmacists and technicians away from manual, repetitive tasks and toward higher value clinical and financial activities that directly influence outcomes and margin.
At Saint Peter’s, we are already seeing how operational complexity creates friction across access, documentation and reimbursement. AI has the potential to remove that friction by streamlining prior authorizations, eligibility verification, and documentation workflows. As those processes become more automated, expectations around speed, accuracy, and throughput will rise significantly.
This creates a leadership imperative. We have to be intentional about reskilling our teams and redesigning roles so that technology enhances, not replaces, the value of the workforce. The opportunity is not just efficiency. It is the ability to expand capacity without increasing headcount and to redeploy talent into areas like specialty pharmacy growth, ambulatory care and value based performance.
In the near term, AI will not change who we employ as much as it will change what we expect from them. And the organizations that move with urgency now will set the standard, while everyone else works to catch up.
Irvin Alfonso, PharmD. Director of Inpatient Pharmacy at Moffitt Cancer Center (Tampa, Fla.): Over the next two years, AI will be a key driver in shaping how pharmacy services operate at Moffitt, particularly as we transition to Epic next year. Epic will provide the essential enterprise foundation for medication management, standardization, and interoperability, but it will not, on its own, fully address the growing complexity of oncology pharmacy practice. As we evaluate future AI-enabled tools, our focus should be on how they will augment pharmacy workflows by reducing manual work, supporting staffing and capacity planning, and enabling pharmacists and technicians to practice at the top of their licenses. In medication safety, we need to start assessing how AI should help identify high-risk orders, detect outliers, and prioritize pharmacist reviews without slowing throughput. As for drug shortages and inventory management, AI needs to be leveraged to provide predictive insights, earlier alerts, and scenario modeling that go beyond native EHR functionality. Collectively, partnering with our IT department, we are confident that these approaches will help position AI as a force multiplier that enhances safety, efficiency, and sustainability.
Paul Green, PharmD. Director of Pharmacy Services at Westchester Medical Center (Valhalla, N.Y.): In the very near future, I believe AI will begin to reshape the pharmacy workforce by changing how we prioritize work, not by replacing the need for pharmacy expertise. Our teams manage enormous amounts of clinical, operational, financial, and regulatory information every day. AI can help us identify risk earlier, forecast workload more accurately, and reduce manual work that pulls pharmacists and technicians away from higher-value patient care. The opportunity is not just task automation, but better medication-use intelligence across areas like clinical surveillance, inventory and shortage management, specialty pharmacy workflows, 340B stewardship, and operational decision-making.
At Westchester Medical Center and across WMCHealth, that matters because pharmacy is deeply connected to high-acuity care, ambulatory growth, medication safety, access, and overall health-system performance. AI will also raise expectations for pharmacy leaders to build teams that can use these tools thoughtfully, validate their outputs, and recognize when technology may introduce bias, safety risk, or workflow disruption. Used well, AI should reduce avoidable administrative burden, support more sustainable workloads, and allow pharmacists and technicians to spend more time on work that requires clinical judgment, collaboration and accountability to patients.
Steffany Loper, PharmD. Director of Pharmacy at Ohio Hospital for Psychiatry (Columbus): Artificial intelligence is often viewed as a threat to clinical judgement, but the reality is far more nuanced. I like to think of it as a tool. Something to ensure a consistent baseline of care. Over the next two years I expect to see a higher demand for pharmacists with strong clinical skills because AI has automated inventory management, prior authorizations and prescription entry. This shift allows more time for helping patients manage complex drug therapies. Areas such as specialty pharmacy, ambulatory care, pharmacogenomics and medication therapy management will grow in value. I think pharmacy, like other professions will see more career opportunities in data analytics, informatics and decision support tools. Rather than replacing pharmacists, AI may push our profession toward higher level clinical decision making, oversight and patient-centered care.
Thomas Carey, PharmD. Senior Director of Pharmacy Services at UW Northern Illinois (Rockford): UW Health is rapidly adopting AI tools which is driven, in part, due to labor shortages and reimbursement constraints. By leveraging these tools for prior authorization teams, data analytics and prescription capture we have begun to free up valuable human resources by offloading administrative tasks. Simultaneously, we are utilizing similar tools for retail pharmacy reimbursement optimization to improve margin capture. We are also focusing efforts on our strategic vision on how we integrate AI into our clinical pharmacist workflows. Being thoughtful and deliberate to balance the value of clinical decision support tools while expanding the scope of the profession.
Nicole Copley, PharmD. Director of Pharmacy at Encompass Health Rehabilitation Institute of Libertyville (Ill.): Artificial intelligence has already affected the healthcare system here at Encompass Health. We follow up with high-risk patients after discharge, and we now have AI assisting us with those follow-ups. It can be helpful with reaching more patients, but it definitely has its limitations. We still have to review the information and follow-up on any concerns that may have been able to be addressed in real time with a live person.
I think AI has some opportunities in helping improve healthcare, but it’s still somewhat in its infancy. Over time I’m sure we’ll see some pretty amazing things, but I think in the next two years, we’ll still have limitations with technology. I remain optimistically hopeful that it’ll be a beneficial contribution to improving patient’s well-being and overall healthcare needs.
Tanya Bolte, PharmD. Market Director of Pharmacy at ScionHealth (Louisville, Ky.): When I think about how AI will shape the workforce in the short term, there are a few domains which it will impact the workforce:
- Shrinks the training/onboarding time and experience gap: AI tools and insights will allow entry-level professionals and technical staff to be prompted to provide work products that are indistinguishable from experienced staff. From the technical perspective, AI tools will move to codify customary practices that may take weeks to months to learn.
- Increasing levels of sophistication in AI evidence tools will bring the latest and greatest evidence in a user-friendly interface for immediate use: This should bring increasing ease, confidence and efficiency in tailoring medication therapy.
- Staff scheduling and inventory management in the institutional setting has the potential to be refined and made more efficient when these AI tools are leveraged and makes the data into bite-sized actionable next steps: There’s no shortage of data, information and analytics, but AI will continue to get better at helping departments take the next steps to act on the data.
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