When your position could have been automated thirty years ago by vending machines... yeah, pharmacists are in trouble.
Some chains are moving to a call-in model, where your medicine is provided through cheap labor (and eventually machines) -- then if you have any questions, which is the ostensible purpose of a pharmacist, you can Skype with a pharmacist at a call center.
Such a model is probably fairly miserable for the pharmacist, but it seems like the obvious solution for automating the work while still complying with (what I can only assume was intended as) protectionist regulation.
You're conflating pharmacy technicians with pharmacists. There are soft skills involved; it's remarkably hard to automate the person who has to know the weird interactions with drugs that different physicians prescribe--and how they interact with the over-the-counter, off-label, or just plain illegal stuff that their customers are taking.
Pharmacists keep people alive when their physicians try (with the best of intentions, mind) to kill them.
That doesn't sound right to me. Humans are better than machines at the memorization and computation of a database that lists every drug in existence and the consequences of all possible combinations thereof?
Pharmacists may be able to give a soft personal touch when interacting with patients, but the same could be said about travel agents, retail clerks, or taxi drivers. Or lawyers, for that matter. Still, I can't see why six-figure salary pharmacists are essential to vend pills.
If your vending machine misses a drug interaction who's legally responsible? That job can't be on the physicians alone because patients often have more than one and they don't coordinate fully.
If your human pharmacist forgets a drug interaction, who's responsible? It's a pretty pedestrian question that doesn't become impossible to solve once you introduce machines. I would assume the company that manufactures the machine would assume liability for errors that result from their negligence.
In fact, I'm pretty certain that the average laptop with Excel is more than powerful enough to outmatch the most skilled human pharmacist when it comes to memorizing and predicting known drug interactions. If anything, you'd expect malpractice insurance rates to skyrocket for human pharmacists compared to automated vending machines -- just as you'd expect car insurance to go up for human-piloted (and error-prone) cars versus their automated counterparts.
Some chains are moving to a call-in model, where your medicine is provided through cheap labor (and eventually machines) -- then if you have any questions, which is the ostensible purpose of a pharmacist, you can Skype with a pharmacist at a call center.
Such a model is probably fairly miserable for the pharmacist, but it seems like the obvious solution for automating the work while still complying with (what I can only assume was intended as) protectionist regulation.