Want to counsel patients in any language? You can—and soon you probably will

Lindsay Dixon was playing around in ChatGPT—the popular artificial intelligence technology that uses natural language processing to enable human-like conversations—when a question came to mind: What can we do with this in pharmacy? That line of thinking led Dixon—a Victoria, B.C. pharmacist who founded digital media platforms Friendly Pharmacy5 and CreateRX—to develop AI Pharmacy Counsellor, an AI-driven tool that can create medication and health counselling videos using a particular pharmacist’s image and voice. Once launched, AI Pharmacy Counsellor can be used to provide important clinical and health information in virtually any language. “As pharmacists, we’re required to counsel all patients on new medications and sometimes it’s hard to tell how much they’re really absorbing and when they leave, you might be wondering if they understood enough and if they’re even going to take the medication,” Dixon told Pharmacy Practice + Business. “And it’s not always a question of comprehending medical information. We live in a multicultural society so in some cases it’s a question of language.” Read: Waterloo integrating ChatGPT into pharmacy course Dixon is among a small but enthusiastic group of pharmacists in Canada who are innovating with AI. Vancouver pharmacists Mark Zhou and Ajit Johal—co-founders of vaccine education platform Immunize.io—recently developed a learning program for health professionals that uses generative AI to create case-based simulations. “Namely, we’re using patient avatars so it feels like there’s actually a patient in front of you and they’re asking you questions,” explained Johal, clinical director at Immunize.io. In many pharmacy schools, he added, students get access to simulated learning only in the latter years of the program. In most cases, these simulations use human actors. “It’s expensive for schools to hire patient actors and they’re limited to a particular pool of actors,” said Johal. “Whereas with our program, you can have avatars of patients from different ethnicities, age groups and even different languages or accents. So it simulates what pharmacists would encounter in real-world settings.” Read: The fight against antibiotic resistance is growing more urgent, but artificial intelligence can help The program is accessible through an education platform called Vaccine Centre of Excellence, which Johal said has about 1,000 registered learners. “We think it’s a great way to make learning more engaging,” said Johal. “And we know there’s better knowledge retention and memory retrieval with simulation learning than with traditional learning.” Dixon, who is already been working on information videos on about 100 medications, called AI a “game-changer” for pharmacists and their patients. She’s shared a number of these videos with about 10 pharmacists across Canada to get their feedback and suggestions for improvement. Dixon said she envisions a scenario where pharmacies could include a QR code on prescription labels, which patients can scan and link to an AI-generated video either right in the pharmacy or in their homes. “Right now I’m using an AI model with my face and my voice but I could just as easily put another pharmacist in there, with their own voice talking in any language their patient requires,” she said. “So far, the response I’ve gotten from pharmacists has been overwhelmingly positive because I think that we’re all aware of this gap in our practice and we would like to address it so we can ensure our patients get the information and care they need.” Read: ChatGPT-generated abstracts so convincing they sometimes fool reviewers

Want to counsel patients in any language? You can—and soon you probably will

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