Jobs / Healthcare / 29-1051.00
Pharmacists
Dispense drugs prescribed by physicians and other health practitioners and provide information to patients about medications and their use. May advise physicians and other health practitioners on the selection, dosage, interactions, and side effects of medications.
- US jobs
- 321,970
- Median wage
- $140,910 a year
- Job family
- Healthcare
Can agents do the work of pharmacists?
We read the evidence at the level of the job family, Healthcare:
- Task levelPartialOne benchmark, from early 2025. On Stanford's MedAgentBench, where agents do clinical tasks in a simulated electronic health record, the best recorded model completes 69.7% of tasks (Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2). It has no maintained leaderboard, so newer models are not measured. No benchmark in our collection tests work with patients.
- Project levelPartialOnly adjacent evidence. GDPval includes nurses among its 44 occupations. OpenAI reports that GPT-5.5's deliverables won or tied against professionals' work in 84.9% of comparisons across all occupations. No benchmark in our collection tests clinical work over days, such as managing a patient's care.
Benchmarks for the job family
These cover work in healthcare, not always this occupation's tasks.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Typical tasks
From O*NET 31.0. Core tasks first. Few of these tasks have a benchmark today.
- Review prescriptions to assure accuracy, to ascertain the needed ingredients, and to evaluate their suitability.
- Collaborate with other health care professionals to plan, monitor, review, or evaluate the quality or effectiveness of drugs or drug regimens, providing advice on drug applications or characteristics.
- Work in hospitals or clinics or for Health Management Organizations (HMOs), dispensing prescriptions, serving as a medical team consultant, or specializing in specific drug therapy areas, such as oncology or nuclear pharmacotherapy.
- Provide information and advice regarding drug interactions, side effects, dosage, and proper medication storage.
- Provide specialized services to help patients manage conditions, such as diabetes, asthma, smoking cessation, or high blood pressure.
- Analyze prescribing trends to monitor patient compliance and to prevent excessive usage or harmful interactions.
- Maintain records, such as pharmacy files, patient profiles, charge system files, inventories, control records for radioactive nuclei, or registries of poisons, narcotics, or controlled drugs.
- Prepare sterile solutions or infusions for use in surgical procedures, emergency rooms, or patients' homes.
- Compound and dispense medications as prescribed by doctors and dentists, by calculating, weighing, measuring, and mixing ingredients, or oversee these activities.
- Assess the identity, strength, or purity of medications.
- Plan, implement, or maintain procedures for mixing, packaging, or labeling pharmaceuticals, according to policy and legal requirements, to ensure quality, security, and proper disposal.
- Teach pharmacy students serving as interns in preparation for their graduation or licensure.
Other job titles for this occupation (19)
Clinical Pharmacist · Clinical Pharmacy Specialist (CPS) · Community Pharmacist · Hospital Pharmacist · Inpatient Pharmacist · Pharm D (Pharmacy Doctor) · Pharmacy Informaticist · Pharmacy Services Clinical Coordinator · Registered Pharmacist · Retail Pharmacist · Apothecary · Druggist · Floater Pharmacist · Industrial Pharmacist · Outpatient Pharmacist · Pharmacy Resident · Prescriptionist · Radiopharmacist · Travel Pharmacist