Q&A: Interoperable AI, Rural Health Transformation Are Reshaping Pharmacy’s Future

Artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving faster than the standards needed to make it work across health care. For pharmacists, that gap has real consequences at the point of care, forcing the industry to address essential questions being disseminated across various health care channels.

In part 2 of our interview discussion, Julia Vu, PharmD, executive vice president of public policy and professional relations at NCPDP, breaks down how her organization is working to ensure that the wave of AI-generated prior authorization tools now embedded in EHR workflows don’t operate in silos but instead communicate seamlessly across prescribers, payers, and pharmacies.

Beyond AI, Vu also unpacks a major federal initiative that has not yet received the pharmacy attention it deserves, the Rural Health Transformation Program, which directs $50 billion in federal funding across 5 years toward states’ rural disease prevention, care access, and connected health infrastructure.

For any pharmacist trying to understand where the profession is heading and what forces are shaping that future, this conversation will help readers envision what’s ahead.

READ MORE: How NCPDP Standards Streamline Prior Authorization, Medication Access

Drug Topics: How do you envision NCPDP’s role in AI and what industry collaboration do you foresee?

Julia Vu: It wouldn’t be a proper podcast in 2026 without AI, right? AI has certainly been transformative in the last 2 years. From my background in AI-powered clinical decision support in the last 2 years, there has been a lot of great advancements there. Going back to our visit on the Hill last week, that conversation went back to how Brian cued us up right now, where it is AI with interoperability, rather than AI alone. We’ve moved forward, but how do we make it even more so better? With that, what we’re looking at together as an industry, what do we do with all those great AI-generated prior authorization templates in the EHR today, from these wonderful ambient agentic vendors as well?

I think of one of my colleagues that is a CMO in the e-prescribe space: Prior auth still feels like a game to some of us, where each of us has our own set of rules. What we’re looking at NCPDP with our partner Standards Development Organizations (SDOs), industry leaders, and our task groups is, how do you standardize the communication, the criteria within prior auth? Whether it’s from the AI agent in the EHR to another agent in the payer side, how do we orchestrate that together? How do we make this work for the patient?

Related to that, I had mentioned the task group. Our Pharmacy Technology Innovation Task Group is working on this right now, where we’re looking at that problem and how do we solve that with standards so that, related to our conversations on the Hill, it is interoperable AI rather than AI on its own. We’re really excited to jump into this next era of transformation of AI and interoperability.

Drug Topics: Can you explain what the Rural Health Transformation Program is and what tools are being used to facilitate its success?

Julia Vu: This certainly came up as a big focus area on the Hill, an education topic. [For] the Rural Health Transformation Program, high level, there is $50 billion of federal funding allocated to the states over a period of 5 years based on their strategic plans. What is that money going towards? There are focus areas on rural health disease prevention, disease management as it relates to access to care, as well as the infrastructure and the connected data behind that. One of the items that we look towards in NCPDP in our pharmacy scope is there are about 9 states that have outlined expanded scope of pharmacist practice. As a pharmacist myself, this very much energizes me with leveraging us as that clinician, that caregiver, that can be that quick access point to a patient.

Now, with the theme of our podcast today, how do we optimize that even more so? For example, pharmacists in Ohio; the strategic plan in Ohio calls for pharmacists to have access to the EHR for that continuity of care. That’s what we’re looking at right now with NCPDP and our members as well, where we have AssureLink—our standards-based connection layer—that uses that anchor of patient-identity matching. By supporting that, and from that, we can connect pharmacies to these public health measures such as obesity management, diabetes management, that rural health is looking at, and tying that with a GLP-1.

Tying our whole conversation together, whether you’re taking a direct-to-consumer medication that you’ve purchased online or you are in a state that is measuring Rural Health Transformation Program outcomes, this is what interoperability sits at the center of, powering that and connecting to that together at a standards-based layer that any provider, health system, or health technology can dial into.

READ MORE: Technology and Data Resource Center