More Human than Human

The next wave of medical tech is helping bring back bedside manner and holistic care

Among the more meaningful use cases for AI, the best might be in medicine. From personalization to diagnostics to drug discovery, the healthcare industry has taken AI adoption to great heights. As the technology matures, 2025 promises more AI-enabled innovations. BOSS spoke with Lindsay Dymowski, co-founder and president of Centennial Pharmacy Services, about what’s next for AI in healthcare.

Helping to Humanize

Lindsay Dymowski

Though concerns about removing humanity from such an important aspect of life are not without merit, Dymowski has seen the opposite happen. Robotic technology has gotten much better at filling and packaging prescriptions, leaving human pharmacists much more time to clinically evaluate patients and interact with them as people.

“The way that I like to explain it is that the robots don’t enable me to have less staff,” she said. “The robots enable my team to be able to do what they actually want to do, so they can use their degree and their certifications for what they’re actually supposed to be used for, instead of counting medications.”

Pharmacists still take the time to check the robots’ work and make sure patients are getting the right medications in the right doses, but they also now have time to know patients holistically because they don’t have to spend so much time counting and sorting.

On the software side, AI enables better patient service by predicting whether medications will be refilled and offering recommendations on whether a specific drug will interact well with an individual patient based on their health profile. For prescription delivery, AI helps optimize storage temperature and driving routes to maximize drug shelf life and safety.

“It’s been game-changing for the logistics of that aspect of pharmacy,” she said.

Root Causes

One of the neat things AI can do is quickly gather and sort through massive amounts of data, allowing clinicians to quickly parse it and put it to good work.

“You’re heavily relying on that pharmacist still, and everything is heavily influenced by the clinical eye of the pharmacist,” Dymowski said, “but the way that the pharmacist can read and decipher the information that is spewed out of these systems … it’s just so much more in depth and helps us take so much better care of the patient.”

The technology shift is allowing for better understanding of drug efficacy and delivery, with AI-supported research developing injectable forms of medications like GLP-1s that make them more effective in the body.

Rapid development of new cancer therapies and treatments for autoimmune diseases are some of the most exciting developments that are already transforming how we think about chronic disease.

“A lot of the new treatments that are being done for rheumatoid arthritis or psoriatic arthritis; those medications are completely revolutionary. They’re not necessarily reducing inflammation, they’re actually stopping the cause of inflammation,” she said. “And the only reason why we know that those mechanisms are available is because of the studies that AI enabled for it and because of the research that AI has enabled for it.”

Remote Monitoring

With more than 75 million Baby Boomers aged 60 or older in the U.S., space in hospitals and care facilities is going to be at a premium in the coming years. Wearable medical devices will help ease this strain by allowing for remote monitoring of patients with chronic conditions.

Devices like glucose monitors not only eliminate the pain, infection risks, and inconvenience of constant pricks, they also keep patients and caregivers on top of blood glucose levels in real time. Pharmacists and doctors can call patients when levels spike or dip and have them come into a facility if necessary.

“Blood pressure monitors are great, too,” Dymowski said. “There are so many stories that I have of patients who are being remotely monitored with a blood pressure unit who maybe, over the span of two days, get extremely elevated blood pressure and get a phone call from their doctor. On one occasion, the doctor told his patient to go to the ER. The ER diagnosed them, and very rapidly they were getting a stent put in to save their life.”

As they become ubiquitous, more aging patients are becoming comfortable with remote monitoring devices, leading to better health outcomes. The data gathered helps providers see how patient lifestyle affects disease management much better than, say, one blood pressure reading at a yearly checkup.

“You can better take care of a patient when you can continually see what is going on with their health,” she said. “It really enables providers to have a holistic understanding of their patient, and it helps to look at their overall health, not just one specific disease.”

Putting more humanity into medical care; now who would’ve thought the rise of AI would do that?