Women in Tech PhIAside Chat Summary

The inaugural Women in Tech Series from the Pharmacy Informatics Academy’s PhIAside Chat. Here we have the academy’s esteemed cofounders, Alyssa Muraoka, an ambassador, and Whitley Yi and myself as guest speakers. We tackled non-traditional pharmacy career paths, the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare, and how to navigate this complex field.

Artificial intelligence is a vast discipline encompassing machine learning, deep learning, and many more emerging sub-fields. It is an area Whitley and I became fascinated with and it is our goal to distill the overwhelming amount of information on AI down to a digestible form for our fellow pharmacists, pharmacy students, and healthcare professional colleagues. Let’s recap what we touched on in this talk:

THE TAKEAWAYS

• AI has broad applications in healthcare, but it remains very new to this industry, and perhaps more so in pharmacy. Applications specific to pharmacy that show promise include supply chain optimization, inventory management, clinical decision support, clinical trial optimization, drug discovery and drug re-purposing.
• AI should be seen as a complementary tool that we can leverage to augment patient care.
• As we move forward with AI, it is absolutely critical that we use quality data to design our models. No AI model is going to be perfect. We have to take into consideration inherent biases in the data and random noise, which could skew the output of such models.
• As pharmacists, we are in a unique position to offer valuable clinical perspectives when looking into how to apply these data to AI. There will be a growing need for more pharmacists in tech as healthcare and technology become even more closely intertwined.
• We recommend, as a start, to take online courses that are of interest to you. A common misconception is that you must learn to code or program; having a basic understanding of the terminology, its capabilities as well as its limitations are sufficient to begin understanding how AI can be applied in real-world use cases.
• Join a hackathon or datathon! These are incredible opportunities for you to dive into the applications of technology in healthcare and collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds and skillsets.
• Connect with like-minded, passionate individuals on LinkedIn, hear their stories and learn from their experiences. You would be surprised how much you learn from a simple, virtual coffee chat.
• If you want to pursue something more concrete, do some research into your local startup incubators or academic institutions and see if there are projects you can involve yourself in.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions about Women in Tech or would like to chat. Otherwise, do join us at the upcoming PhIAside chats and be on the lookout for future Academy initiatives.