In this interview Will Lockwood, Senior Editor at Pharmacy Technology & Management Review, speaks with Parisa “Risa”Vatanka, Pharm.D., Co-Founder and CEO of Digital.Health. The conversation begins by examining the primary drivers that create a high-stress environment in modern pharmacy practice and contribute to what’s widely acknowledged to be a burnout crisis. Vatanka will then focus on solutions, exploring the technology she sees as pivotal for alleviating these pressures and abating the crisis. Finally, Vatanka will offer her vision for how pharmacists can get back to what they do best: patient care.
Will Lockwood: Risa, thanks for speaking with me today. I’d like to get started by talking about pharmacy stress and burnout. Is this real? What do you see as the primary drivers?
Risa Vatanka, Pharm.D.: Community-based pharmacy is living in two worlds at the same time. We have achieved authority for an expanded scope of practice — while we are still working in an operational model and business model primarily designed for traditional practice.
Our expanded scope aligns with our education and training to deliver clinical services from prevention to test-to-treat, to medication optimization, and even prescriptive authority in some states — all improving health and economic outcomes of care. Yet, our operational and workflow models and systems focus on medication processing and dispensing.
Lockwood: It certainly sounds like a recipe for burnout.
Vatanka: I believe the heavy workload, decreasing margins, being short staffed, perhaps even the desire to practice to the top of our education and training — aligned with our expanded scope of practice — while being challenged to do so due to lack of time — are adding to the pressure on pharmacy teams and contributing to burnout.
Lockwood: So the crisis is real. Let’s talk about some solutions then. The long arc of technology has been an effort in many ways to try to apply software and hardware to automate these administrative burdens that pharmacies experience.
Where are we now in this arc? AI is certainly top of mind for everybody these days. Is this the solution for addressing these issues?
Vatanka: AI-powered solutions can improve pharmacy operations by moving away from our reactive, manual processes to a more proactive, data driven operational/workflow model. It will lead to shifting pharmacy teams’ roles and create time for greater connection with patients.
If we go back to the 1990s, when I first entered the pharmacy profession, we began working actively to expand pharmacist scope of services to move beyond a product-focus to a patient-focus, to not only ensure we dispensed the medication as written, but to actually take steps to identify, resolve, and even prevent medication-related problems. However, we didn’t have the time and resources to do so.
We started with reengineering pharmacy operations and workflow — redefining and bringing clarity to the roles of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians. We even developed education and training programs to prepare pharmacy teams for success in these new roles and in these new workflow models. The aim was to free-up pharmacists to have time to engage in patient-centered care services. It was effective in enabling us to create the space for additional services, such as integrating immunizations as a routine component of practice.
Over thirty years later, with all the technological advancements that have brought greater access and efficiency in all other aspects of our lives, it is essential that we apply these advancements to pharmacy — and AI can get us there.
There is a clear opportunity to integrate AI-driven platforms to streamline pharmacy operations and workflow — it is also important to note that there are even AI-driven solutions that support optimizing clinical services. AI Agents can assist with workflow optimization and do many of the administrative tasks like following
up on prior authorizations, inventory management, and outreach phone calls, to name a few — freeing-up pharmacy teams with more time to focus on providing patient care — and with the aim of providing the needed support to reduce burnout.
"I’m a believer that AI-powered solutions integrated in pharmacy operations and clinical services can be instrumental in bridging us to a new era in pharmacy practice, redefining what it means to be a pharmacist, and enhancing the pharmacist-patient relationship. "
Lockwood: What do you see as the future for the pharmacist-patient relationship in an AI-powered world?
Vatanka: I’m a believer that AI-powered solutions integrated in pharmacy operations and clinical services (and I will add, pharmacist application of digital health technologies in medication optimization) can be instrumental in bridging us to a new era in pharmacy practice, redefining what it means to be a pharmacist, and enhancing the pharmacist-patient relationship.
AI-powered tools are transforming human-machine collaboration and redefining how we learn, how we work, and how we interact with the world around us.
Lockwood: There’s a lot of promise here to take that next big step towards creating the best pharmacy environment for pharmacists and staff, and for patients. What’s your vision for what the AI-powered future of pharmacy will look like?
Vatanka: Here is a vision of where we may be headed. Rather than waiting for someone to present with an illness before we fully engage as a healthcare team — we can now build care models centered around the patient — the individual — meeting them within the context of their lives, their needs, their preferences. Individuals will have agency like never before with real-time actionable insights from health apps, wearables, and AI-enhanced solutions to guide them in self-management of their health — and connect them to their pharmacist when needed via remote monitoring or when identified through a predictive AI model being used by their pharmacist for timely action when needed.
Just as we have done in the past, we can once again reenvision pharmacist and pharmacy technician roles and our relationship with our patients. In the near term, AI-driven solutions for pharmacy operations can create time and support for pharmacy teams to practice to the top of their license — while relieving the burnout that prevents us from fully contributing to the health and wellness of the communities we serve.
