Pharmacist will be one the last positions to be fully automated so pharmacist have nothing to worry about. This will also make your job easier. You also get more time to fix the screw ups of the doctors who write wrong scripts much.

+James White I am not too sure for 2 reasons: 1) You only need so many clinicians. It will not take long for hospital administrators at first put a cap on the number clinicians. Then, eventually, those administrators will look for alternatives to that are cheaper and more reliable. (Mostly cheaper) 2) Towards the end, they already showing robots make drugs for chemo-therapy and anticoagulants. Typically those types of drugs were formulated, compounded and dispensed by clinical pharmacists. Now, I could just have a robot make the drug based on patient information and their current prognosis, and then have the medication administered by an RN. Saves money, and improves reliability.

+Michael Iverson Clinical pharmacists do not dispense medications. That is the "old school" job. What we do is to clinically analyze medication orders, design therapy regimens for advance disease states, and provide pharmacovigilance. Now that we are becoming providers, we are charging for our knowledge and experience. Thanks to robotics, we are freed from perfunctory work. I can't remember the last time I touched a drug. My specialty is pharmacokinetics. I design dosing regimens for antibiotics based on renal and hepatic functions. I also use that same science when I get called to the ER to design regimens for antidotes in overdose or toxicities. Just five years ago , I was dispensing meds but new technology allowed me to fully integrate into the treatment team.

+DrVman Thank you for your response. I am not a pharmacists, or even in the medical field, but it does not take to much to see that technology is going to do to raze this profession. (I am Mathematician/Programmer by education). You state that your specialty is pharmokinetics. That is most technical area that a person with a Pharm D can master. However, there are already software that 'help' pharmacists to model reaction rates, drug expectations and so forth. It will only be a matter of time before someone out there that will expect, or an enterprising person to develop and push a smart system that will do more than model, and simulate. It is only a matter of time. Hek, look at the lawyers. The very bread and butter of their profession: Contract writing,, Proof reading contract, wills, and business contracts are increasingly being automated. This had an effect of "Freeing up" lawyers to do litigation and "Court Room Theatrics", but you need so many, and law firms actually laid off lawyers, and the firms are not hiring new lawyers like they use to. But if you asked a lawyer 20 years ago if automation would have any 'Negative' effects on their profession, they would have laughed and thought you were crazy. Michael Iverson

+Michael Iverson There are so many variables in medicine that no single software can make outcomes for us. We use software as a tool but the answer is a machine answer for a machine situation. Every drug is different , even in the same class . One molecule difference will cause a different response. Sometimes how a patient responds will give me a clue as to how a patient will respond to other drug classes. One physician told me that the PharmDs are the Mr Spocks to the MDs' Capt Kirks. Interesting thing once happened; we had a neonate brought in by ambulance. Once stabilized, the child was to be air lifted to the nearest Children's hospital. Our team's job was to design and formulate IV fluids and change osmolality to adjust to the night's atmospheric pressure at the hight of the flight. We don't want the fluids' gas to expand too much in child's veins while in flight. To get all of the answers we used known tables, info from NOAA, the pilot's knowledge, and flight nurse's experience. This was just to make the end product. Before that, we had to figure how the child will metabolize the drugs and which class of drugs would work for that situation. For that we used grey matter software.

why tho

We double or triple check with control stations in the middle of the process, for example, using barcode readers, vision inspection and at the end, an operator (pharmacists) who will check and approve that everything is exactly what was requested.