With a front-row seat to pharmacy’s evolution, alum and Epic executive Joel Jones shares insights on how AI is elevating pharmacists’ roles
By Katie Gerhards
From the invention of the printing press in 1440 to the advent of personal computers and the World Wide Web in 1991, few technologies have so fundamentally accelerated human progress.
The rise of mainstream artificial intelligence (AI) in the early 2020s is another such inflection point, as the technology moves from research labs into everyday workflows. In 2024, 78% of organizations reported using AI, according to Stanford University. And healthcare is no exception: Recent surveys found that 66% of physicians and 39% of pharmacists reported using AI in some capacity.
“We’re aiming to make AI simpler and seamless for the patient and care teams so it can improve costs, quality, and safety,” says Joel Jones (PharmD ’07), vice president of clinical and therapeutics informatics and chief safety officer at Epic. Epic’s electronic health record (EHR) platform — used by more than 3,400 hospitals worldwide — is embedding AI-powered tools into workflows, which is already helping to catch cancer earlier, get patients scheduled faster, and get medications approved sooner.
“Generative AI is here to stay. The way we practice will forever be changed through AI.”
—Joel Jones
Still, AI adoption across hospitals and health systems remains in its early stages, with only about 18.7% of hospitals reporting usage. As the industry is on the cusp of a tremendous change with broader integration, Jones, who has a front-row seat to how AI is being embedded into care delivery, shares his perspective on how the tech holds the potential to expand and elevate pharmacist impact.
“Generative AI is here to stay,” says Jones, who also recently joined the School’s Board of Visitors. “The way we practice will forever be changed through AI. The time is now to start educating yourself on how to use AI for research, for practice, and for everyday tasks.”
Where do pharmacists fit into the way that AI is transforming healthcare?
I think we all wish we could have a pharmacist next to every physician and supporting patients when they’re at home. AI will help scale that pharmacist expertise through new digital channels, making knowledge available to more prescribers and patients in new ways. This has the potential to transform pharmacists’ care roles — driving new in-person and remote clinical services that can improve costs and access for patients.
I also think about the rapid growth of new medications that are coming to the market and the increasing complexity of therapy guidelines, so I think that is really where pharmacy is going to lead with AI to transform these care pathways and direct patient care.
How can AI enhance the way pharmacists identify risks, collaborate, or personalize care?
The interesting thing here is the amount of clinical information that is being generated just continues to grow almost exponentially. When people think of EHRs, they think of structured data, like medications, allergies, and social drivers of health, for example. But there’s also a lot of nonstandard data — notes, narrative impressions, referrals that are scanned into media tabs, PDFs with genomic results.
AI is helping in several ways: One, it can synthesize all of that information to deliver specialty-specific summaries — for example, an oncology-specific summary for an oncology pharmacist, allowing him or her to do conversational search within the chart to leverage all that patient data, helping pharmacists right within their workflows.
Two, it can help generate business intelligence reports. If I’m a chief pharmacy officer and I want to create a report on all of my 340B dispenses, AI can help. On the administrative side, prior authorization takes a lot of time for pharmacy staff and patients. At Epic, we have over 50 organizations live on our new AI model, and health systems are reporting a 30% to 40% decrease in the time to process prior authorizations, so that gets patients their therapies faster.
It’s going to reshape clinical support in general, helping to leverage all of the clinical knowledge and directing it right into prescriber workflows, which includes pharmacists leveraging CPAs in the health system and community practice.
Does AI threaten or replace the role of pharmacists?
The same sort of thing was said about calculators and computers, but each time, society adapted. Decades later, the job exists, but the work is different, and I think the same is true here. When I look at health systems, it’s difficult to manage, say, all the ICU patients in one hospital. But if you scale out and say, what about the rural hospital that doesn’t have a pharmacist, or what about patients taking risky drugs at home? This is where AI will help pharmacists work smarter and faster and reach new sites of care that they were just previously unable to reach.
I think there are things we’ll automate. For the longest time, I’d get a vancomycin referral and figure out the dose. This is where a good AI assistant could help suggest the default dose, write my note, curate patient education, titrate a drip, but that takes time for the pharmacist today. By relieving those tasks, it means we could deliver care to populations of patients who need dose changes in their home immediately, while opening more touchpoints for pharmacists, whether it’s to improve use, costs, or outcomes.
“This means better diagnoses, and for pharmacists, it means more targeted therapies that can save lives.”
—Joel Jones
There will be a mix of interventions that pharmacists will do and AI agents will do. For example, if a patient is taking a new medication to manage blood pressure and their monitor is not reading anything, an AI agent could just call the patient and let them know they need to hook up their blood pressure monitor. Now that’s something the pharmacist doesn’t need to do. However, if the patient’s readings are such that we need to make a dose adjustment, this is where a pharmacist’s prescribing protocol, with AI support, and a quick video visit can make dose titrations easier and more effective in the home. We’re working with Sutter on this AI agent now, and it’s so energizing to be able to reimagine care.
Are there examples where you’ve already seen AI making a meaningful difference?
I think one of the neatest things AI can do is just help make sure that no handoffs are missed. Last month alone, using Epic software, we had 6 million summaries of medical records generated for clinicians, and those clinicians reported AI discovering information over 25% of the time that they would have missed with manual chart review, so it’s a really great way to improve clinical touch points and decision-making.
The other thing we’ve seen, in one of my roles as safety officer, is thinking about diagnostic safety and hand-offs. We have an AI that scans the impression from imaging studies, identifies risks, and coordinates the follow-ups. One of our early adopters reached a 69% rate of early-stage cancer diagnosis, compared to the national average of 46%. For patients, this means better diagnoses, and for pharmacists, it means more targeted therapies that can save lives.
Which pharmacists should be most tuned in to AI?
All pharmacists in all settings. There’s a lot of hype in AI and people are being sold on it like it’s going to magically solve all problems, and it’s not. But what it can do is a lot of heavy lifting for us.
Pharmacists need to be pro AI, yet skeptical and asking critical questions. That’s the balance that’s needed.
There will be an opportunity to iterate inside of practice with AI — rapid prototyping, testing in a trusted and safe environment. I think that’s a great place for young pharmacists, because they don’t come in with preconceived notions of how things have always been done. They can test theories, iterate, and improve the practice model through AI.
What’s most exciting to you about the intersection of pharmacy and AI right now?
Every patient can be on the best possible therapy. AI can have access to 300 million patient journeys. Every pharmacist can now learn from every other pharmacist to make the best decision for the patient they’re caring for.
At the same time, we are working with the most innovative healthcare systems in the world. For those groups that are innovating, pushing the edge with AI and new models of care, Factory is our new platform to help customers create and deploy their own agentic workflows, directly in Epic.
How do you envision AI and EHR innovations transforming daily pharmacy practice within the next 10 years?
Logistics and physical movement will still be human, augmented with AI, connected to robotics, hand-filled by exception. But I think the workday will be very meaningful without so many wasted or menial steps.
For example, we have this thing today called auto verification. It allows the system to automatically release certain medications to patients and nurses without a pharmacist having to check it, but that varies across states and across systems. I think there will be a growing number of situations where AI can either automate a task or augment a task, making space for work that is more meaningful for pharmacists.
And with Agent Factory — which allows our customers to create and monitor AI agents that can reason, decide, and execute steps autonomously — we’ll see new automations for rare diseases, an ability to scale population health programs for pharmacists, and feel like care just got simpler.
What’s the most important thing that you want pharmacists and pharmacy researchers to know about AI’s integration in healthcare?
It’s real and we have all the ingredients needed to transform care at a pace we haven’t seen before. When you look at AI, the breakthrough of the math and the algorithms needed, it came out many decades ago. But it was before computers were fast enough to leverage all those capabilities, before we had this explosion of data being generated. Now we have the computers, we have the models, and we have the data, so it’s going to allow for collaboration and quickly creating new medical knowledge that can be built right into workflow quickly.
