Cybersecurity Challenges and AI-Based Solutions for Digital Pharmacy Management

Abstract

The rapid adoption of digital technologies has transformed pharmacy management by enabling electronic prescriptions, digital medication records, automated dispensing, online pharmacy services, cloud-based pharmacy information systems, and integrated healthcare platforms. While these technologies improve efficiency and accessibility, they also increase cybersecurity risks associated with patient information, prescription records, medication databases, payment information, and pharmaceutical supply-chain data. Cyberattacks such as phishing, ransomware, malware, unauthorized access, credential theft, data breaches, and manipulation of digital prescriptions can affect both patient safety and organizational operations. Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides new opportunities for addressing these cybersecurity challenges through intelligent threat detection, anomaly identification, behavioral analysis, automated risk assessment, and predictive security monitoring. This research examines major cybersecurity challenges affecting digital pharmacy management and proposes an AI-based security framework for improving the protection of pharmacy information systems. The proposed approach integrates data collection, preprocessing, AI-based anomaly detection, risk classification, automated alert generation, and human security intervention. The study adopts a conceptual and literature-based methodology and discusses the potential contribution of AI to secure digital pharmacy environments. The analysis indicates that AI can improve the speed and accuracy of threat detection while supporting continuous monitoring of pharmacy systems. However, AI-based cybersecurity also introduces challenges related to data privacy, model reliability, false positives, adversarial attacks, computational requirements, and explainability. The study concludes that AI should be integrated with conventional cybersecurity controls, strong access management, encryption, employee awareness, and appropriate governance to establish a secure and resilient digital pharmacy environment.