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  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="iso-abbrev">Arch Pharm Pract</journal-id>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">archivepp.com</journal-id>
      <journal-id journal-id-type="publisher-id">Arch Pharm Pract</journal-id>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>Archives of Pharmacy Practice</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
      <issn pub-type="epub">2320-5210</issn>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">archivepp.com-1272</article-id>
      <article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.51847/BDjsmWFfzU</article-id>
      <article-categories>
        <subj-group subj-group-type="heading">
          <subject>Original research</subject>
        </subj-group>
      </article-categories>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Pharmacy Practice in the Age of Agentic Systems That Can Plan, Act, and Escalate</article-title>
      </title-group>
                    <contrib-group>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Gonzales</surname>
                <given-names>Maria</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                                            <xref rid="cor1" ref-type="corresp" />
                          </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Santos</surname>
                <given-names>Jose</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Cruz</surname>
                <given-names>Anna</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff2" ref-type="aff">2</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Reyes</surname>
                <given-names>Carlos</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff3" ref-type="aff">3</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                  </contrib-group>
                  <aff id="aff1">
            <label>1</label>Department of Agentic AI and Pharmacy Practice, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of the Philippines Manila, Manila, Philippines.
          </aff>
                  <aff id="aff2">
            <label>2</label>Department of Autonomous Systems in Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Philippines.
          </aff>
                  <aff id="aff3">
            <label>3</label>Department of Escalation and Human Oversight, Faculty of Pharmacy, Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines.
          </aff>
                          <author-notes>
            <corresp id="cor1">
              <bold>Address for correspondence:</bold> Prof. Wael Abu Dayyih, Department of
              Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Faculty of Pharmacy, Mutah University, Al-Karak 61710, Jordan.
                              E-mail: <email xlink:href="maria.gonzales@upm.edu.ph">maria.gonzales@upm.edu.ph</email>
                          </corresp>
          </author-notes>
                    <pub-date pub-type="epub">
        <day>30</day>
        <month>03</month>
        <year>2026</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>17</volume>
      <issue>1</issue>
      <fpage>39</fpage>
      <lpage>47</lpage>
      <permissions>
        <copyright-statement>
          Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Archives of Pharmacy Practice
        </copyright-statement>
        <copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
        <license>
          <ali:license_ref xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/"
            specific-use="textmining" content-type="ccbyncsalicense">
            https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/</ali:license_ref>
          <license-p>This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of
            the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows
            others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate
            credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.</license-p>
        </license>
      </permissions>
      <abstract>
        <title>A<sc>BSTRACT</sc></title>
        <p>Artificial intelligence in pharmacy has largely been framed as a source of predictions, alerts, classifications, or generated recommendations. Agentic systems create a different governance problem because they may maintain task state, formulate multistep plans, invoke tools, initiate workflow actions, monitor resulting conditions, and decide whether to revise, stop, or escalate. This article develops a non-empirical governance architecture for situating such capabilities within medication-use work. The proposed Bounded Agentic Pharmacy-Work Theory conceptualizes agentic performance as a relationship among a defined pharmacy-work mandate, authorized context, planning and action functions, permission constraints, consequence monitoring, escalation pathways, and accountable human and organizational control. Four interacting layers are proposed: the pharmacy-work mandate, agentic execution, permission and authority, and human and organizational control. These layers are connected through mandate specification, an action envelope, an authority contract, an escalation contract, and a trace-and-consequence ledger. A plan–act–monitor–escalate cycle is introduced to distinguish generation of a plausible plan from permission to cause a medication-related action. Evaluation must therefore extend beyond model accuracy to plan coherence, tool use, permission adherence, action correctness, reversibility, monitoring sensitivity, escalation performance, human factors, medication-safety consequences, equity, robustness, and local workflow effects. The architecture does not establish that agentic systems improve pharmacy practice or that any proposed permission level is clinically, legally, or regulatorily acceptable. Its original contribution is a testable framework for determining how agentic capability may be bounded, evaluated, supervised, restricted, or withdrawn before it is treated as legitimate pharmacy-work authority.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
                <kwd>Digital pharmacy</kwd>
                <kwd>Artificial intelligence</kwd>
                <kwd>Pharmacy practice</kwd>
                <kwd>Medication safety</kwd>
                <kwd>Human–AI collaboration</kwd>
                <kwd>Clinical decision support</kwd>
              </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
</article>