Case Overview:

The Emory Healthcare System employs one Drug Information pharmacist who serves ten hospitals.  This case study describes the pilot study of Emory hospitals’ pharmacy departments, piloting an online pharmacist-reinforced AI tool to facilitate the answering of complex and time intensive drug information questions and formulary reviews.

Tool and Project Details:

The tool we are using is called InpharmD, which works by running rules and algorithms to answer questions we submit.  An InpharmD pharmacist reviews the output of the algorithm and provides real-time feedback to the model to help strengthen future AI responses. This approach enhances accuracy and improves confidence in the answers received.  The site also allows pharmacists to search existing questions and answers from queries of other healthcare systems or view a running list of all questions and answers submitted each day. The output is formatted through a monograph template of our choosing, which InpharmD completes, citing the sources, and prepares for P&T presentations.

Key Elements of Success:

Our organization is currently in the pilot phase for this tool. As part of the tool evaluation, our team has done surveys of our pharmacists asking for their feedback on the tool, which has been overwhelmingly positive.  Key benefits for our organization include the tool’s ability to run hospital-specific reports of questions asked and provide estimated cost and time savings based on utilization.

Impact on Outcomes:

In the last quarter of 2024, hospital pharmacists on our pilot sites asked approximately 350 questions and reviewed 2,700 answers to previously submitted questions.  The tool also prepared 10 P&T related documents. This was estimated to save 866 hours of pharmacist time (equivalent of 2 FTEs) with monthly cost savings of roughly $30,000.

Role of the Pharmacy and Pharmacists:

This is a pharmacy-led AI pilot guided by the drug information pharmacist and clinical director. The tool itself employes pharmacy experts to ensure accurate content, and the pharmacy team has input on the tool’s use and workflow integration.

Budget & Resource Allocation:

A full budget assessment is not concluded, as at this point, we are still piloting it. 

Lessons Learned & Future Goals:

The biggest challenge at this stage is securing funding, as the cost of the tool increases with the number of users. Ideally, we hope to have this tool available for all pharmacists and physicians for the system. Based on the ROI to date, we hope to use this tool with our residents to provide 24/7 on-call drug information services so that we can offset some of the cost with CMS reimbursement.