AACP’s debut Artificial Intelligence Institute drew a big audience looking for answers about the rapid changes that AI is bringing to the digital environment and what that means for pharmacy education.
By Joseph A. Cantlupe
As artificial intelligence bursts into day-to-day life, and in- creasingly into the healthcare sphere, pharmacy schools run the gamut from slowly testing the AI waters to diving right in. But nearly everyone agrees they must be prepared to con- front the mushrooming reality of artificial intelligence now. That was the message as AACP presented its inaugural Use of Artificial Intelligence in Pharmacy Education Institute, held virtually April 3-5. Some participants expressed deep concern about the prospects with AI, but most agreed that it will be a dominant issue in healthcare for years to come.
“I think everybody recognizes that AI is going to impact pretty much everything we do,” said Dr. Anne Lin, dean and professor at the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences at St. John’s University and an AACP past president. “I heard from people who attended the Institute who felt that it was in some ways almost overwhelming. AI is moving so quickly and so fast that if we don’t stay on top of it, we will in fact fall behind.”
During the sessions, academic pharmacy leaders who welcome AI said it can overhaul instruction with dynamic efficiency and depth, in evaluations and assessments and in real-life decision making. AI-enhanced simulation technolo- gies can create more realistic and diverse clinical scenarios, offering students the opportunity to practice in a wider range of situations. It also can monitor students’ techniques and provide immediate feedback on accuracy, safety and adherence to protocols, according to some who presented at the Institute.
College and university officials are beginning to deter- mine how AI is integrated into curricula, including ways to expand the lessons for students. Student pharmacists are creatively integrating AI into their higher education. But some cautioned that there are ethical issues to overcome as well as the potential for misleading information that must be monitored closely, as professors and students recognize AI’s limitations. Meanwhile, schools must confront challenges in the classroom as students use AI before clear guidelines have been established. Pharmacy schools are evaluating procedures and establishing protocols to keep pace with this fast-growing phenomenon.
Proceeding With Caution
The Institute was one of AACP’s most highly attended, said Dr. Sarah Shrader, senior director of academic programs and professional development at AACP. “We feel it was a suc- cess. We had the challenge of trying to figure out what the needs were in our Academy, and they are so varied,” she said. “Some people had never even opened any basic AI tools that are out there such as ChatGPT.”
After the sessions, Shrader said a poll of attendees suggested that many were skeptical or scared of AI. “You know that shows a lot of people obviously have a lot of work to do,” she said, adding that some were “caught off guard” by the ap- proaching AI possibilities. On the other hand, “other people are using it every single day and have many sophisticated programs. We are trying to figure out how we can meet their needs, and this is a good first step.” Shrader anticipates a series of professional development sessions in future years. “It’s a very critical and rapidly changing topic; we will be div- ing deeper to address certain aspects with AI and taking a more specific approach in various areas.”
During the sessions, panelists explored AI’s origins when scientists began laying the groundwork in the early 1950s and later explored various medical applications in the 1970s. Moderating a panel on how AI is used in pharmacy practice today, Dr. Risa Vatanka, co-founder and CEO of Digital. Health, described the technology’s early days as being “characterized by algorithms and clinical decision support to the evolution to machine learning—and now generative AI and other AI-based solutions.” In moderating a session on how student pharmacists are using AI, Dr. Mary K. Gurney, professor, department of pharmacy practice at Midwestern University College of Pharmacy, said, “Pharmacy students, the architects of tomorrow’s healthcare landscape, are creatively integrating AI into their higher education, revolutionizing workflow processes and unlocking myriad potential applications.”
A Matter of Trust
Dr. Michael Fulford, assistant dean for institutional effectiveness and strategic initiatives and director of faculty affairs at the University of Georgia (UGA) College of Pharmacy, led the session “Revising Assessments in an AI World,” which provided insight into how AI can be used with assessment today and what may happen in the future. When it comes to the use of immersive technology and AI, “medi- cine is ahead of where we are today,” Fulford said, comparing medical practice and education to pharmacy practice and education. “The pharmacy profession is playing catch up in this arena. We must be open to these changes in technology and embrace using them. However, pharmacists are risk averse, and they should be in most cases, but when it comes to education and technology, we’re going to have to push a little bit out of the comfort zone to take that next big leap in regard to innovation and AI.” He applauded AACP’s leader- ship for taking these first steps with AI initiatives including the Institute, programming at annual meetings and reaching out to new sponsors and partners who are working in immersive technology and AI.
At UGA, Fulford is leading an interdisciplinary presidential cluster hiring initiative focused on translational education research in the health professions. This initiative seeks to bring new faculty to UGA who will build bridges between innovations in practice and education using immersive technology and AI. The College of Pharmacy is partnering with the College of Veterinary Medicine and the College of Education to build this faculty cluster so they can “create an immersive learning experience,” which includes AI, he said. One goal of the cluster is to bring a “transformative perspective to the experience in the classroom and the curriculum and better prepare future pharmacists to use immersive technology and AI in the practice of the future.”
While there are enormous possibilities with AI in pharmacy education, Fulford believes the curriculum should anchor to three key literacies identified by Joseph Aoun in his book, Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of AI. Aoun posits that every student should learn three literacies as a part of their curriculum: technical literacy, data literacy and human literacy. Human literacy is especially important because “what AI and computers—as good as they can try to be—will never truly replicate is the concept of humanity and what we bring to healthcare and education,” Fulford noted.
He added that the biggest hurdle we face with AI in general, but especially in relation to assessment, is trust. “We can talk all we want about technology and AI and all the amazing stuff it can do, but really the first thing we must talk about is trust. Trust in someone or something else is developed through repeated behaviors and experiences, so until we spend time getting to know AI and build a ‘relationship’ with AI, we will continue not to trust it because it will remain a stranger to us.”
Asking the Right Questions
From the professor’s chair to the lab to the classroom, AI’s potential impact is formidable. Academic leaders are work- ing to integrate the variations of study, data and patient care possibilities into the curriculum. “We have started having those conversations to think about how you handle AI in the classroom settings,” said Shrader. “Our student pharmacists are going to be pharmacists who utilize these AI tools in the healthcare systems, and that’s a skill set they need to develop.” For many universities, the curricula have not been adjusted to incorporate AI learning.
Attendees and panelists examined a litany of possibly unset- tling questions. Among them: What if a pharmacy school decided to incorporate AI into much of its coursework but was concerned that the institution became too reliant on AI assistance? And what about the impact on students’ critical thinking or clinical judgment? What if an instructor felt con- flicted about a top student using AI to complete an assign- ment who previously had a clean academic record?
Sometimes, people use the AI tools but “are not recognizing the limitations because all tools have limitations,” said Lin, who led the session “Artificial Intelligence Competencies for Health Professions Education.” She added, “The ques- tions themselves—the way they are worded—can result in prompts that determine the answers and determines what comes back to you.”
“There are guides now of how to write good question prompts; that’s a skill, how to recognize information that’s coming back that is not accurate,” Lin continued. A portion of an AI piece, for instance, “may sound plausible and real but there is no such article. How does a student learn how to evaluate these tools, about whether what they are reading is accurate? That’s a big part of it.”
Those are some of the questions St. John’s University is ex- amining as it takes significant steps to evaluate the use of AI in the classroom and the ethical implications. There is even discussion of prohibiting AI. The university’s artificial intel- ligence task force is “looking at what all this means for not just my school but the entire campus,” Lin said. “There are going to be guidelines on how to use these tools. You don’t want to put anything out that violates HIPAA regulations, so ethical uses in that sense also become important.”
Shrader noted that these conversations will be ongoing as schools wrestle with what the future holds now that AI is here to stay. Among the major concerns are not only the accuracy of some of the AI tools but the need to recognize their limitations and identify frauds. “The accurate verify- ing of information and potential bias of these systems is an important conversation moving forward. These are skills that we have to teach our student pharmacists to be able to navigate along with patients.”
Joseph A. Cantlupe is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.