Building the Autonomous Pharmacy: A Road Map for AI-Enabled Medication Management

For more than a decade, health systems have talked about the autonomous pharmacy—a fully digitized, self-optimizing medication-use process in which error rates approach zero, and pharmacists work at the top of their license—as an end state. Getting there, however, has proven slower than the vision suggested. A new white paper argues that generative and agentic artificial intelligence (AI) may finally be the catalyst that moves health systems past the fragmented, manual workflows that have kept most organizations stuck at the limited or intermediate stages of automation. A 5-level model for classifying AI-enabled pharmacy systems may help health systems advance to new levels of pharmacy autonomy.¹