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Pharmacy Informatics is a Death End Career in IT

October 6, 2018 By Votng

Ask Me A Question › Category: General Pharmacy Questions › Pharmacy Informatics is a Death End Career in IT
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Votng asked 4 years ago

I think Pharmacy informatics is a death end career in IT.

IT killed the profession slowly in the future by replacing rph by Pharmacy tech who have less responsibility and hence have more time to learn epic and made rph look bad just because rph do the clinical task that IT has no interest in.

Then IT think rph is not necessary for the epic anymore.

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1 Answers
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Dani Staff answered 4 years ago

Hi Votng,
I respectfully disagree with you. I don’t think that pharmacists can ever be replaced by technicians or that pharmacy informatics is a dead end career in IT.

Technology is driving a lot of changes in healthcare as well as virtually every aspect of our lives these days. Any profession or individual that is opposed to adapting to changes in technology is setting themselves up to become obsolete very quickly.

Advances in technology have helped advance medical care tremendously. For instance, now oncologists can now run tests (using technology) to find out what a patient’s risk for certain cancers are and then make a clinical decision about what treatment or prevention strategy to employ in order to preserve that patient’s life. I’m sure you’ve heard about some women opting to undergo mastectomies as a preventative measure… Without technology this wouldn’t be possible but it doesn’t make the clinicians obsolete.

Let’s bring this back to pharmacy… Are you aware that the science of pharmacogenetics can help predict how patients will react or respond to medications and can help better inform pharmacists about proper treatment protocols? Without the pharmacist who would be able to apply the clinical know-how to the information that technology gives us?

I don’t know if I can change your mind about this but all I will say is that technology (which humans develop by the way) can only replace clinicians that aren’t operating at their maximum potential as a clinician. If all a pharmacist does is lick, stick, and pour, then for sure, machines can do that a lot more efficiently but a machine cannot use the same clinical judgement that a pharmacist can.

With regard to Epic not needing pharmacists, I also do not believe that because again, the clinical decision making that goes into building the software for clinical end users is not something that non-clinicians can do.

I plan to write a post about this shortly.

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Hi there, I’m Dani, Pharm.D. Clinical pharmacist. IT pharmacist. Regulatory affairs specialist. More about me.

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