Human assistance, when knwoledeable and respectful, can engender trust, a very important element of any pharmaceutical purchase. While technology can serve the industry in many positive ways, I hope and expect that human pharmacists are here to stay.

Call some big corporation and endure their voicebot jail — then ask yourself if this is how you’d like to communicate with your pharmacist. Personal trust is important.

As a pharmacy user, since I have gotten older, I have found the interaction with the pharmacist very beneficial. Doctors often overlook the interactions possible between different drugs and the pharmacist has become an important part of the healthcare delivery system.
Yes technology will make a difference but a focus on the human interaction is going to make the difference where people get their prescriptions filled.

Questions about healthcare and medications are too important to trust to a bot.

As Baby Boomers age the need for face-to-face conversations will grow. Ideally, this happens with someone at the pharmacy counter, but easy to use tech that involves a customer talking to a real person works, too.

I believe the pharmacy sector is one that is dependent on personal interactions and can’t be easily replaced with technology. Healthcare is complicated and that human touch is important. From a retail perspective, pharmacy choice is often dictated by location and considering there’s a pharmacy on every corner, personal relationships can help provide value and earn a customer’s repeat business.

In my experience the pharmacy tech systems make mistakes or do not interface well across systems. The saving grace has been the pleasant and helpful pharmacists who can interpret what is happening, fix mistakes, and tweak the systems. Until the tech systems really work as promised (which is many years away), the pharmacists are critical for success. With the aging population and new systems or system changes, the need for pharmacists is not going away.

Customer service is often discussed here, and yet the technology experts believe face to face service can be replaced by a call center, or worse yet an online menu of most asked questions, with prepared answers, that may or may not help solve your inquiries. Department stores have cut their staffs in order to stay lean, and some consumers simply can not find what they need and leave the stores with little or nothing including pharmacies, which deliver your prescriptions without any need to go to their stores. I don’t see this changing. Staying competitive requires the ability to provide both services. Bottom lines are slowly shrinking, as raising prices is a sure way to lose business in the ultra competitive world we live in. There are exceptions in many pockets of very healthy economies, where both can co-exist and make handsome profits, but many smaller towns are finding it tough to compete with both online giants and mega stores 10 miles down the road. That is simply how it is today. Technology can help… Read more »

Looking at this realistically, I believe as technologies improve, consumers will adopt less human intervention, just as they already have in other aspects of their lives.

The primary differentiator for pharmacies, i.e., the reason people stick with a particular pharmacy, has always been the trust the patient had in the pharmacist. While moving to bots might make sense for the retailer in the short term, it takes away a critical connection point with the patient, as well as an important point of difference. Doing so will likely open the door to more online ordering and mail delivery as an unintended consequence.