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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-1285</article-id>
      <article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.51847/pN0iDcYpWH</article-id>
      <article-categories>
        <subj-group subj-group-type="heading">
          <subject>Original research</subject>
        </subj-group>
      </article-categories>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>The Digital Pharmacist Proxy and the Clinical Acts That Must Remain Human</article-title>
      </title-group>
                    <contrib-group>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Petrova</surname>
                <given-names>Elena</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                                            <xref rid="cor1" ref-type="corresp" />
                          </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Georgiev</surname>
                <given-names>Ivan</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff1" ref-type="aff">1</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Stoyanov</surname>
                <given-names>Nikolay</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff2" ref-type="aff">2</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                      <contrib contrib-type="author">
              <name>
                <surname>Kolev</surname>
                <given-names>Petar</given-names>
              </name>
                              <xref rid="aff3" ref-type="aff">3</xref>
                                        </contrib>
                  </contrib-group>
                  <aff id="aff1">
            <label>1</label>Department of Digital Proxies and Pharmacy Practice, Faculty of Pharmacy, Sofia University, Sofia, Bulgaria.
          </aff>
                  <aff id="aff2">
            <label>2</label>Department of Human-Only Clinical Acts, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Plovdiv, Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
          </aff>
                  <aff id="aff3">
            <label>3</label>Department of AI Boundaries in Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Ruse, Ruse, Bulgaria.
          </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="elena.petrova@uni-sofia.bg">elena.petrova@uni-sofia.bg</email>
                          </corresp>
          </author-notes>
                    <pub-date pub-type="epub">
        <day>30</day>
        <month>06</month>
        <year>2026</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>17</volume>
      <issue>2</issue>
      <fpage>67</fpage>
      <lpage>74</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 is moving from supporting pharmacy work toward producing outputs that can appear to represent the pharmacist. This shift creates a boundary problem: technical capability to retrieve, classify, draft, or recommend does not by itself establish authority to perform a professional clinical act. This article proposes a Digital Pharmacist Proxy–Professional Boundary Model for distinguishing acts that may be delegated to a digital proxy, acts that require conditional human–AI co-production, and acts that must remain human-led. The model begins with the act rather than the technology and evaluates verifiability, reversibility, contextual sufficiency, relational dependence, ethical or normative load, authority and consequence, and the operational management of uncertainty and accountability. These dimensions are assembled within a proposed permission envelope specifying scope, users, population, inputs, outputs, autonomy, pharmacist oversight, fallback, monitoring, and expiry. Informational and administrative acts may be delegable when they are bounded, auditable, reversible, and low in normative consequence. Medication-related interpretation may require co-production when uncertainty, contextual incompleteness, or meaningful clinical consequence demands pharmacist review and authorization. Relational engagement, value elicitation, ethical exception handling, professional commitment, and final authority-bearing decisions remain human-led under the proposed model. Validation would require task-level technical assessment, human-factors testing, workflow evaluation, equity analysis, prospective safety study, and governance testing. The model is an original non-empirical synthesis. It does not establish professional equivalence, clinical benefit, regulatory acceptance, or deployment readiness, and its boundaries require empirical and normative validation across pharmacy settings.</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>