‘A personal assistant for every pharmacist’: Asepha’s AI for pharmacies

When Eunice Wu was a retail pharmacist, she was most frustrated by two things. One was customers who were upset they had to wait, thanks to pharmacy inefficiencies. And the second was how much of her time she spent on paperwork. “Eighty per cent of my time was spent on manual documentation,” she says. Those “personal pain points” inspired Wu to create Asepha, a company that makes AI tools for pharmacies. The aim to help pharmacists be more efficient, she says, describing it as “a personal assistant for every pharmacist.” It covers a wide range of services, including helping pharmacists with medication reviews, patient education, scribing, minor ailment assessments and travel consultations.It can cut the time needed for medication reviews in half, Wu says. It pulls all the relevant guidelines, monographs and information, then presents this literature and identifies actions the pharmacist should investigate. The pharmacist double-checks the information and makes the clinical decision, and the app performs all the documentation. It can draft a physician’s note in a few seconds if needed.Read: Artificial intelligence in retail pharmacy: the impact and potential of AIWith travel consultations, pharmacists upload a travel itinerary—and Asepha gives them a list of recommendations. “It’s automating the manual work,” Wu says. “The goal is to allow pharmacists to perform 100% patient-facing care.” Asepha is much more accurate than ChatGPT and Google Bard, and in-line citations allow them to click through to see where the information comes from, Wu says. “Unlike ChatGPT, where there’s a lot of hallucination, and the references can be incorrect, we’re kind of the opposite way, where we look at the information first, generating a full evidence report, before having the AI look to it for answers.” Read: ChatGPT: an ally in dealing with vaccine hesitancy Wu launched the product about a year ago with her co-founder, Can Uncu, who is a developer. She says her pharmacy background helped her raise capital for her idea. “One thing that venture capital investors look for is this domain expertise, and there are very rarely pharmacists in the entrepreneurial space,” she explains. “A lot of pharmacy companies, their CEOs and C-suite are not pharmacists.”The company is based in Toronto, but Asepha is used in pharmacies across Canada and the U.S. The information it includes differs by location; it uses local documentation requirements and the software will rank Canadian information higher for Canadian users. Read: ChatGPT is mostly wrong in answering drug questions, study showsPharmacy software companies are the primary purchasers of Asepha, integrating it into their offerings for pharmacists. But there is also a version for independent pharmacies.The team is entirely made of pharmacists and developers, which Wu says means they deeply understand pharmacists’ needs and are critical about what to include in their AI. “We really have a huge emphasis on safe use of AI in pharmacy practice,” she says. “What people don’t understand is that just because something can be automated doesn’t mean it should be automated.” She hopes this technology will help pharmacists do more with their training and use their time more efficiently. “I envision each pharmacist will be able to become their own pharmacy. You don’t need a team, you’ll be able to perform all the tasks that you need, and you can use what you were taught in school.”Read: Artificial intelligence in the service of type 2 diabetes screening

‘A personal assistant for every pharmacist’: Asepha’s AI for pharmacies

Register for free access or login.

Related Topics