Artificial intelligence (AI) is already transforming healthcare, including pharmacy operations, clinical workflows, and business processes. As adoption accelerates, it’s essential to ensure that AI is implemented responsibly—especially given the sensitive nature of patient data and the complexities of care delivery. Success in this space requires a balance of high tech and high touch: robust human oversight and ethical governance. Here are four key steps to help healthcare and pharmacy organizations use AI effectively, safely, and with a focus on patient-centered care.
Step 1: Use AI as a Code Companion
The first step is internal evaluation of AI models for maturity and reliability, which will reveal an organization’s ability to adopt and utilize AI. Whether building custom models or partnering with vendors, organizations must assess if the models are well-trained with relevant datasets and capable of accurate, context-aware output.
Engineers should experiment with AI as coding companions, integrating them with development environments, testing responses, and tuning outputs based on specific configurations. The goal is to ensure the AI becomes predictable, contextually aware, and minimally reliant on human correction for core functions.
Step 2: Empower Internal Teams with AI Tools
Once engineering confidence is established, AI can be deployed across internal operations – supporting patient services, contact centers, and care coordination teams.
Chatbots and AI agents (Agentic AI) should be integrated with workflows to improve responsiveness and efficiency. It’s essential to train internal staff on prompt engineering to ensure they interact with AI effectively. Clear inputs yield accurate outputs, so staff must understand how to frame questions and interpret responses.
As AI becomes more integrated into healthcare, it’s worth asking: is it actually making the patient experience better? Technology should support, not replace, the human connection patients rely on, especially when it comes to things like treatment advice or getting answers to urgent questions. If patients can’t easily reach a real person when it matters most, we risk losing the trust and comfort that personal care provides.
Finding the right partners and enabling internal teams with the ability to discern when a human touch is needed is vital to balancing AI technologies with patient-centric care.
Step 3: Integrate AI into Business Processes
With operational experience in place, AI can be embedded into broader business processes. This includes:
- Rules-driven decision support
- Accelerated clinical pathways
- Workflow automation
- Document scanning and interpretation
AI should never operate in isolation. To ensure safety and accountability, systems must include confidence scores and escalation paths so that high-stakes decisions always involve a human review. The best outcomes result from combining high-tech automation with high-touch human judgment. This ensures that business processes do not become reliant on AI but rather use it as a tool to improve efficiency and the overall patient care experience.
Step 4: Unlock Value Through AI-Driven Insights
Healthcare institutions are rich in untapped data, and AI can dramatically speed up the process of discovering insights through predictive and prescriptive analytics.
By layering patient data onto advanced models, organizations can quickly identify cost drivers, care trends, and optimization opportunities – without needing extensive computing infrastructure or large analytics teams. This accelerates time-to-value by helping patients better utilize their health and pharmacy benefits, while also improving the quality of care they receive. At the same time, it creates new opportunities for cost savings through smarter resource allocation and more personalized services.
So, What’s Next?
As healthcare organizations progress through each phase of AI adoption, the balance between technology (high tech) and human oversight (high touch) naturally evolves. Initial AI rollouts require heavy oversight, but with each successful implementation, confidence in the technology grows. Still, the need for human touch remains essential. In fact, as AI takes on more tasks, human involvement becomes even more critical, enabling providers to deliver better care and build stronger patient relationships.
Responsible AI isn’t a one-time effort; it requires continuous training, ethical oversight, and thoughtful integration into workflows.
By following these four steps, pharmacies and other healthcare organizations can safely harness AI’s power – while keeping patients at the center of care and staying aligned with regulatory standards.
About Praveen Kotha
Praveen Kotha is the Chief Technology Officer at True Rx Health Strategists, where he leads the company’s technology strategy and oversees the development and implementation of innovative solutions. With over 20 years of experience in information technology—particularly within the health care sector—Praveen is a seasoned expert in digital transformation, cloud initiatives, and cybersecurity. He is known for driving innovation that enhances operational efficiency, scalability, and security in complex health care environments. Before joining True Rx, Praveen held senior technology leadership roles at UnitedHealthcare, WithMe Health, and Magellan Healthcare. In these roles, he led large-scale digital transformations and strategic initiatives aimed at improving healthcare delivery and patient outcomes. Praveen holds a master’s degree in computer engineering from Mississippi State University and an MBA from Strayer University.
