TECH OUTLOOKMay - 202019Some challenges that may impact the pharmacy extend to other areas of healthcare. I recently read an article outlining the very real prospect of a nurse shortage in the U.S. and that impact will be felt across many healthcare sectors. To think that pharmacy will be immune from any impact is naïve; however, it represents an opportunity to offer expertise in serving the patients who will feel the most pain from the impact. Pharmacy needs to be well positioned to seize this opportunity.To ensure the pharmacist is well positioned and practicing at the top of their license, there has been progress at the state level in pushing provider status legislation for pharmacists. However, there is plenty more work to do at the national level.Required Skill Sets for Leaders in this LandscapeLeaders, to be successful in pharmacy, need to continue to be professional and honest with those they serve. Given the rapid pace of change in technology, being agile and adaptable is more of a requirement than ever before. People developing healthcare solutions need to get out and talk to their customers, ask questions and listen to their answers. We have to stop assuming we have the solution to problems before we truly know what the problems are.Exciting Future Technology InnovationsAugmented and virtual reality, hands down. Currently, the vast majority of applications are focused on gaming and entertainment, so the field is truly wide open for development in healthcare.The limitations of the applications are difficult to get my head around; if there are limitations, they might only be in the form of processing power and human resources to code the applications, but those are usually short-lived and are good limitations to chase.Imagine using VR/AR to treat depression and anxiety, relaxation/distraction techniques for pain reduction, process and workflow creation and evaluation, scenario-based training, and utilizing machine learning algorithms to create new training scenarios. The possibilities are vast, and limited only by imagination and resources. Today, immersive training requires expensive tangible elements and limited occupancy space. Virtual and augmented reality can allow for a similar immersive experience with unlimited occupancy along with virtualized elements.As we encourage patients to take more ownership of their healthcare, and encourage adherence, we must support continued development of new technologies and patient engagement methodsTechnology as a Driving ForceI work in an innovation center surrounded by developers and designers, so most of my work life is driven by technology. I consult internally on multiple projects, contributing from clinical and pharmacy regulatory perspectives.Most of us are surrounded by technology quite literally in the cars we drive, our smart phones and televisions, integration into our home HVAC systems, and in our wearable technologies, which produces this immersive sense of being always connected. For the most part, these technologies have been very beneficial and fundamentally changed the way we communicate and stay connected with one another. For example, consider how we buy and listen to music, how we book travel, and how we get our news. We can track our nutrition; compete with friends for fitness goals, post vacation pictures and, of course, cat videos on social media. Running low on detergent? Press a button. Need razors? Fire up your app and change your delivery schedule.However, advances in technology can also produce unintended consequences. For example, manual Drug Utilization Review (DUR) is a losing proposition from every angle for a pharmacist. Automated DUR programs are great, but they can produce alert fatigue, and interactions and inappropriate doses can be overlooked. In hands-on care settings, telemetry units produce thousands of alerts daily, producing this same danger of alert fatigue. The unintended consequences of advances in technology require real solutions in themselves. Will those solutions produce their own unintended consequences? Making the distinction between benefiting from technology and relying on technology is an important one to make and sometimes, we need to just put it down for a while and get outside.At Fuse, we're developing software and hardware technology to give retail pharmacists some much-needed visibility into patients' medication-taking patterns with the goal of connecting patients with their pharmacists to facilitate regular, focused, data-driven conversations about their wellness. Scott Lust
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