IT-enabled medicine dispensing in the community pharmacy: an action design research project

This paper presents a community pharmacy information system to assist with medication dispensing and monitoring medication adherence. The proposed prototype uses artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, and mobile technology to support patient medication records, reduce medication errors when preparing pillboxes, and provide personalized information to end-users. Action design research was selected to understand how innovative dispensing processes can be deployed in community pharmacies. The results include design guidelines for AI-enabled medicine dispensing and an evaluation of digital transformation success factors in this vital healthcare sector. AI-enabled systems can contribute to (1) prevent errors in filling pillbox compartments, (2) provide an additional cross-check in medication dispensing, and (3) identify medication adherence problems in more demanding scenarios of institutions with multiple patients. However, there are also relevant challenges, making the replacement of non-critical manual tasks, complementary checkpoints, and pre-validation stages of medicine dispensing the most promising use cases for artificial intelligence adoption.