Counting what we save-and what we never have to spend: Cost savings and cost avoidance from an AI-enabled pharmacy...

Clinical trial protocols are highly complex documents that outline the objectives, design, methodology, statistical considerations, and operational details of a study. Departments, such as nursing, pharmacy, and labs, create tailored summaries that allow others in their field to efficiently access information without combing through hundreds of pages of a protocol. Creating these summaries can be time intensive and are a barrier to study activation. With increasing complexity of study design and momentum towards individualized medicine, artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted workflows may present an opportunity to increase efficiency and reduce study overhead.

Determine the impact of AI-assisted workflows in preparing pharmacy clinical trial documents.

A generative AI prompt was developed to produce summaries which include elements of manually created summaries. Pharmacists completed summaries manually and with AI assistance in parallel. Studies were selected sequentially, with all new trials submitted within the stated observation timeframe considered for assessment. Time required to complete summaries was compared between manual and AI-assisted methods, and a cost-effectiveness and cost-avoidance analysis was performed.

An AI-assisted workflow cut pharmacy summary-sheet preparation time 80% (148 → 30 minutes), yielding a negative incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of -$97 per hour saved and a net monetary benefit (NMB) of $423 per task (∼$30,000 annually for six pharmacists). One-way sensitivity analyses across productivity, salary, fringe, and IT overhead ranges all stayed cost-saving; the worst case still delivered a NMB of $465. A 10-year Monte-Carlo analysis varying AI price growth, performance drift, upgrade shocks, and labor inflation never crossed break-even (mean discounted NMB $294 k, (95% CI $265-323 k).

AI automation reliably frees pharmacist time, curbs costs, and scales favorably as trial volume grows across diverse settings and future documentation-intensive pharmacy tasks. This study evaluates the cost-effectiveness of implementing an AI-assisted workflow for pharmacy summary sheet creation in clinical trials. We compare the AI workflow to a traditional manual process, analyzing labor costs, time efficiency, ICER, and NMB. Findings indicate significant cost savings and efficiency gains, supporting the adoption of AI-driven automation.