“The Amazonian municipality of Caracaraí has 22,000 inhabitants and an overworked pharmacist named Samuel Andrade.

Andrade arrives at work at 8 a.m. to handle hundreds of prescriptions from free government clinics. Most days, he can’t get through all of them. He sometimes gets stuck for hours cross-checking drug databases to ensure nothing has been prescribed incorrectly by rural doctors. 

It is stressful work. He has to help the dozens of patients who line up at his dispensary every day, some of whom have traveled for days to get there. Sometimes he has to rush through prescriptions, and worries he will miss something dangerous.  

In April, Andrade welcomed a new assistant: artificial intelligence software that flags potentially problematic prescriptions and digs up the data to help him decide if they are safe. It has quadrupled his capacity to clear prescriptions, he told Rest of World. In the months since he started using the AI assistant, it has caught more than 50 errors, he said.”

From Rest of World.