ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND PATIENT SAFETY: NEW PERSPECTIVES FOR PHARMACEUTICAL PRACTICE

Abstract

The incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare processes has been reshaping pharmaceutical practice, particularly regarding patient safety and the prevention of adverse drug events. Given the expansion of clinical decision support tools, prescription screening systems, and predictive technologies, it becomes necessary to understand how these innovations have been incorporated into pharmacists' daily practice and what their limitations are. This study aimed to analyze the available scientific evidence on the use of AI in pharmaceutical practice and its implications for patient safety. This is an integrative literature review, conducted through a directed search of the health sciences literature, guided by controlled DeCS and MeSH descriptors and by explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria, resulting in a final corpus of 19 studies published between 2022 and 2026. Findings were organized into three categories: applications of AI in pharmaceutical practice, contributions to patient safety and pharmacotherapy, and challenges, limitations, and ethical implications. The synthesis showed that AI has been mainly employed in prescription screening, clinical decision support, medication adherence monitoring, and pharmacovigilance, promoting reduced medication errors, optimized care time, and expanded pharmaceutical interventions. However, challenges remain regarding data quality, algorithmic bias, external validation of models, and the need for qualified human oversight. It is concluded that AI represents a promising support tool for pharmaceutical practice, provided that its adoption is guided by ethics, continuous professional training, and the maintenance of human clinical judgment as the central element of care.