A strategic approach to improving pharmacy enterprise automation: Development and initial application of the Autonomous Pharmacy Framework

The use of technology in health-system pharmacy practice is evolving as electronic health records (EHRs), robots, packagers, and smart devices are adopted.1,2 These technologies greatly increase the amount of pharmacy data collected, thereby enabling more powerful and effective data-driven automation. Data-driven automation leverages flows of digital data throughout an enterprise to achieve improvements. Unfortunately, the technology adopted in health-system pharmacy thus far has not sufficiently taken advantage of data-driven automation to improve safety, quality, and business outcomes. Twenty years after To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System3 highlighted medical errors, progress toward safer care remains slow.4 Enough data are sometimes available to achieve modest improvements.5 However, widespread practice improvement requires high-quality data to be routinely collected, analyzed, and acted on at all practice sites to achieve measurable gains.6-9 How health-system pharmacy responds to the potential of data-driven automation is critical. Today, health-system pharmacists spend a quarter of their working hours on clinical activities.10 With better automation, pharmacists could spend most of their time working with patients to solve their most challenging medication-use issues. Therefore, we believe better data-driven automation is required to enable pharmacists, technicians, and pharmacy staff to transition from focusing mostly on medication procurement and distribution processes to focusing on direct patient care, generating value from clinical programs, and solving complex problems for patients.